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THE FIRST CENTURY OF THE REPUBLIC. 



THE FIEST CENTURY 



OF 



THE KEPUBLIC: 



A REVIEW OF AMERICAN PROGRESS 



BY 

The Rev. THEODORE D. WOOLSEY, D.D., LL.D. ; F. A. P. BARNARD, LL.D. ; Hon. DAVID 
A. WELLS; Hon. FRANCIS A. WALKER; Prof. T. STERRY HUNT; Prof. WIL- 
LIAM G. SUMNER ; EDWARD ATKINSON ; Prof. THEODORE GILL ; 
EDWIN P. WHIPPLE; Prof. W. H. BREWER; EUGENE LAW- 
RENCE ; The Rev. JOHN F. HURST, D.D. ; BENJAMIN 
VAUGHAN ABBOTT ; AUSTIN A. FLINT, M.D. ; 
S. S. CONANT ; EDWARD H. KNIGHT ; 
and CHARLES L. BRACE. 







NEW YORK: 
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 

FRANKLIN SQUARE. 
18 76. 



y 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876, by 

HARPER & BROTHERS, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



PUBLISHERS' ADVERTISEMENT. 



History, as it is usually written, touches only the state. The grand- 
eur of state affairs and the magnitude of national vicissitudes, on the 
one hand, and, on the other, the ambition of political leaders and the an- 
tagonism of parties — transferred, it may be, in some mighty crisis, from 
the peaceful senate to the martial camp — afford the material and the per- 
sonages of a drama so exciting, and of so popular a character, that the 
writer who most skillfully embodies these elements becomes the peer of 
the statesmen and military heroes whom he has glorified. But this social 
form or structure which we call the state, while it enfolds all other social 
forms, and sets its imposing seal upon the modest undertakings in indus- 
try, art, and learning, which constitute the life of the people, yet does 
it receive from this popular life all of its vitality, dignity, and meaning. 
Especially is this true of the republican form of polity, because that form 
more immediately and perfectly represents the people. 

The thoughtful publicist, therefore, who, from a retrospect of the past 
century should seek to estimate our present condition as a nation, or our 
outlook for the future, would direct his attention not to our political an- 
nals, but to the industrial, aesthetic, intellectual, and moral development 
of our people. He would not refer to state papers, to the congressional 
record, to the history of the great parties that have upon various issues 
divided the nation, nor to our military capabilities as manifested in three 
great wars. His inquiries would relate rather to the part taken by the 
American people in the remarkable material progress of the last hundred 
years, — to their inventions, their manufactures, their development of the 
resources of the soil — agricultural and mineral, — their commercial activity, 
their increase in population, their educational institutions, their advance- 
ment in science and art, their literature, their humane enterprises, and 
their moral and religious culture ; while in such a review he could not 



8 PUBLISHERS' ADVERTISEMENT. 

ignore the important political experiment undertaken by this people in 
the formation and maintenance of the union of states under a federal con- 
stitution. 

The work here submitted to the reader is precisely such a review as 
we have above indicated, of our progress during the first century of our 
national life — the result of inquiries undertaken not by one, but by a score 
of publicists, each one of whom is, in the field occupied by him, a special- 
ist of the highest authority. Such a work, considered as the production 
of a single writer, would be impossible, since in nearly every department 
the review is the condensation of the results of life-long research and spe- 
cial study. A perusal of the table of contents, including the subjects of 
inquiry and the names of the authors, will discover the value and impor- 
tance of the work as a comprehensive literary exposition of the century. 
The grand exhibition at Philadelphia is international, and not entirely 
American ; it is limited to the disj)lay of the material symbols of progress ; 
and it is confined almost entirely to the results of present activity in the 
various fields included in its representation. The exposition attempted in 
this work is an indispensable supplement to that exhibition. It connects 
the present with the past, showing the beginnings of great enterprises, 
tracing through consecutive stages their development, and associating 
with them the individual thought and labor by which they have been 
brought to perfection. It connects with the outward fact its formative 
idea. It is, moreover, in the main American ; though, in certain fields, it 
was found impossible to wholly separate American from European enter- 
prise without violent dislocation. 

Nearly all of the papers here published were originally contributed 
to Harper's Magazine ; the scheme of the entire series, and the plan, to 
some extent, of each paper having been determined upon before a sin- 
gle word was written. These papers during their serial publication have 
elicited the approbation of intelligent readers throughout the country. 
The successful execution of a project of such magnitude, and involving 
so important contributions from so many of the most eminent writers 
of America, has been generally accepted not only as adequate to the 
great anniversary occasion that suggested it, but also as an unprecedented 
event in the annals of periodical literature. Occasional articles in a mag- 
azine are usually of merely temporary importance; but these papers, con- 
taining information never hitherto collected and organized into one his- 
torical body, are a valuable contribution to the permanent history of our 



PUBLISHERS' ADVERTISEMENT. 9 

country. An unusually large amount of space was given to the depart- 
ment of Mechanical Progress, but not disprojDortionate, when it is con- 
sidered how characteristic of the century has been the advance in this 
field, and how largely other progress has depended upon it. The same 
consideration justifies the elaborate and extended treatise on Scientific 
Progress. In the department of American Literature, too, it was im- 
possible to present a satisfactory review, or, indeed, any thing beyond 
mere generalization, within the limits allotted to most of the papers. 
Each of these longer treatises, including also those on Population and 
Monetary Development, is in itself a volume of valuable information. 

The scheme of the work is as novel as it is comprehensive, no similar 
undertaking having ever been attempted. While it is not overweighted 
with cyclopedic details, it traces, in every field of industrial and mental 
activity, the larger outlines of progress. 

The results of this retrospect of a century's growth, in those fields 
which suggest a comparison between our own and the contemporaneous 
development of other countries, are such as to awaken a feeling of just 
pride in every American citizen. And the reflections naturally deduced 
from these results, as to the characteristic features of our people, contra- 
dict those which are drawn from a superficial review of the social and 
political abuses of the day, and are re-assuring as to the hopeful future of 
the Republic. 

A carefully prepared analytical Index renders the contents of the vol- 
ume available for reference, and gives it its full value as a comprehensive 
review of American progress. 

Franklin Square, New York; July 20, 18*76. 



CONTENTS. 



INTRODUCTION: COLONIAL PROGRESS. 

By EUGENE LAWRENCE. 

The Declaration of Independence. — Character of the Signers. — The Condition 
of the Colonies. — Wealth and Population. — Social and Political Charac- 
teristics. — Colonial Agriculture, Manufactures, and Commerce.— The Slave- 
trade.— Western Pioneers and the Savages. — Education and Keligion. — 
Journalism and General Literature Page 17 

II. 

MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 

Bt EDWARD H. KNIGHT. 

Mechanical Progress a Characteristic Feature of the Century. — Agricultural 
Implements. — The Steam-engine and its Applications. — Steam Navigation. — 
The Locomotive.— Cotton Manufacture. — Iron. — Engineering. — Wood-work- 
ing. — Elevators. — Domestic Machinery. — Safes. — Fire-arms and Ordnance. — 
The Telegraph. — Electroplating. — Electric Light. — Fire-engines. — Atmos- 
pheric Railway. — Balloons. — Weighing - machines. — Gas. — Silver. — Ice. — 
Sugar. — Porcelain. — Glass. — Paper. — India Rubber. — Meteorological In- 
struments. — Anaesthetics. — Artificial Limbs. — Aquaria. — Matches. — Musical 
Instruments. — Type - founding. — Type - setting Machines. — Stereotyping. — 
Electrot yping. — The Printing- press. — Folding - machines. — Addressing - ma- 
chines.— Printing for the Blind. — Engraving. — Lithography. — Photogra- 
phy. — Photolithography. — Miscellaneous Photo - processes. — Photomicog- 
raphy 39 

Illustrations. — Patent-office, Washington ; Newcomen's Steam-engine ; Watt's double-acting Steam- 
engine, 1769 ; Rude modern Plows ; The Origin of the Hoe and the Plow ; American Plow of 1776 : 
Plows, 1785-1874; Howard Wheel-plow; Fowler's Steam-plow; Reaping in Gaul, first to fourth Century 
a.d. ; Gladstone's Reaper, England, 1S06 ; Bell's Reaper, England, 1S26 ; "Champion " self-raking Reap- 
er ; Meikle's Thresher, 1786 ; American Threshing-machine ; English Threshing-machine ; Single-acting 
Cornish Pumping-engiue ; Symingtou's Steamboat, "Charlotte Dundas ;" Pulton's Steamboat, "Cler- 
mont," 1S07; Bell's Steamboat, "Comet," 1812; Screw Steamship "City of Peking ;" Trevethick and 
Vivian's Locomotive, 1S05 ; Evans's Locomotive ; Blenkinsop's Locomotive, 1811 ; Hedley's Locomo- 
tive, 1813 ; Dodd's and Stephenson's Locomotive, 1815 ; Stephenson's Locomotive, 1829 : English Loco- 
motives ; American Locomotive (two views) ; Whitney's Cotton-gin; Spinning-wheel; HargreavesV 
Spinning-jenny; Arkwright's Spinning-machine; Mule Spinner; Crompton's fancy Loom; Iron Fur- 
nace of the Kols, Hindostan ; Modern Blast-furnace; Puddling-furnace; Danks's Mechanical Puddler; 
Rolling-mill for Iron Bars; Nasmyth's double-frame Steam-hammer; Bessemer Plant; Perkins's 
Transferring-press and Roller-die ; Whitworth's Millionth Measuring-gauge ; Caisson at Copenhagen : 
Caisson of the East River Bridge, New York; Floating Derrick, New York ; Floating Dock "Bermu- 
da;" Perronet's Chain-pumps, France; Current Water-wheel, London Bridge, 1731; Heading of the 
Excavation, Hallett's Point Reef, East River, New York; Iron Arch Bridges; The Illinois and St. Louis 
Bridge ; Iron Truss and Lattice Bridges; Portable Circular Saw; Baud Saw; Moulding-machine ; Gen- 
eral Wood-worker ; Blanchard's Spoke Lathe ; Singer Sewing-machine; Lamb's Knitting-machine; Tay- 
lor's Machine Gun ; Morse Apparatus, Circuit and Battery ; Morse Key ; Morse Register ; Duplex Tele- 



12 CONTENTS. 

Illustrations — Continued. 

graph; Electroplating; Electric Light; Steam Fire-eugiue, "Washington, No. 1 ;" Diagram of Gas- 
works ; Stetefeldt's Roasting - furnace ; Carre's Apparatus for Ice -making; Modern Sugar Process; 
Centrifugal Filter; Glass-making in Egypt; Successive Stages of Cylinder Glass; Pulping- engine : 
The Barograph ; Condell's Artificial Arm ; Egyptian and Cuneiform, Ideographic and Syllabic Char- 
acters ; Phonetic Languages of Asia ; Phoenician and Egyptian Writing j Bruce's Type-casting Ma- 
chine ; Casting-pan; Stereotyping — Plaster Process: Moulding-press — Clay Process; Beating-table — 
Papier-mache Process ; Stereotype Mould-drying Press — Paper Process ; Black-leading Machine ; Elec- 
trotyping-press ; Electrotyping Bath and Battery ; Benjamin Franklin's Press ; Lord Stanhope's Press ; 
"Columbian" Press; "Washington" Press; Principles of Action of Power -presses ; Adams Press; 
Campbell's Single-cylinder Press; Gordon Job Press; Walter's Perfecting-press ; Bullock Perfecting- 
press; "Victory" Perfecting-press and Folding-machine; "Hoe" Web Perfecting-press; Chambers's 
Folding -machine; Addressing - machine ; Lithographing Hand -press; Hoe's Lithographic Printing- 
machine; Bellows Camera; Enlarging Solar Camera; Stereoscopic Camera; Osborne's Copying Came- 
ra and Table ; Woodward's Micro-photographic Apparatus ; The Lord's Prayer. 

III. 

PROGRESS IN MANUFACTURE. 

By the Hon. DAVID A. WELLS. 

What are Manufactures? — Sources of Information. — Progress from 1607 to 
1776. — Cause of the American Revolution. — Progress since the Revolu- 
tion. — Number of Persons employed in Manufacture. — Social Condition of 
Laborers Page 147 

IV. 

AGRICULTURAL PROGRESS. 
By Professor WILLIAM H. BREWER. 

Early Introduction of Foreign Plants. — Relation of Mechanical Progress and 
Scientific Discovery to Architecture. — Changes in the Use of Agricul- 
tural Implements. — Application of Chemistry to Agriculture. — Improve- 
ment in Fertilizers. — Draining and Irrigation. — Grazlng and Stock-rais- 
ing. — The Cheese Factory System 174 

V. 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF OUR MINERAL RESOURCES. 

By Professor T. STERRY HUNT. 

Distribution of Coal. — The Petroleum Industry. — Iron Mines and Iron Manu- 
facture. — Copper-mining. — Gold and Silver 185 

VI. 

COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT. 
By EDWARD ATKINSON. 

The True Function of Commerce. — Adam Smith's " Wealth of Nations." — Lessons 
from the History of the Dutch Republic. — Abolition of Restrictions upon 
Commerce between the States. — Other Injurious Restrictions still En- 
forced. — Our Great Centres of Manufacture and Agriculture. — Our Na- 
tional Commerce. — Concentration of Population in Cities and Towns. — 
Influence of Commercial Activity upon Modern Life 200 



CONTENTS. 13 

VII. 

GROWTH AND DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION. 
By the Hon. FRANCIS A. WALKER. 

The Early Settlements, 1607-1660. — Settlements in New York, New Jersey, and 
Pennsylvania, 1660-1688. — Settlement of Georgia, 1733. — Western Settle- 
ments, 1754-1790. — Population in 1776. — The First Census, 1790. — Extension 
of Settlements since 1790.— Cities. — The Centre of Population. — The Arith- 
metical Process of the National Growth. — The Geographical Process of 
the National Growth. — The Pacific Coast Settlements. — The Post-office. 
— Our Foreign Elements. — Interstate Migration. — The Population of 
1870 Page 211 

Illustrations -Map showing the Acquisition of Territory, 1776-1S68; Map showing the Progress 

of Settlement East of the 100th Meridian , Map showing Progress Westward of the Centre of Popula- 
tion from Baltimore, 1800-1870; Maps Illustrating Iuterstate Migration; Map showing Density of 
Population. 



VIII. 

MONETARY DEVELOPMENT. 
By Professor WILLIAM G. SUMNER. 

Barter Currency in the Colonies. — Early Paper Currency. — Financial Meas- 
ures of the First and Second Continental Congresses. — The Bank of North 
America. — The Financial Situation at the Close of the Revolution. — Es- 
tablishment of the Treasury Department. — The National Bank, 1791. — Pas- 
sage of the Mint Laws, 1786. — Financial Result of the European Wars, 
1791-1815. — Effect of the War of 1812. — The United States Bank, 1816. — 
President Jackson's Opposition to the Bank. — Suspension of Specie Pay- 
ments in 1837. — Situation of the Banks in 1840. — Paper Money in the West. 
— Discovery of Gold in California. — The Panic of 1857. — Financial Legisla- 
tion DURING THE ClVIL WAR. — THE NATIONAL BANK ACT OF 1863. — THE PRESENT 

Situation 238 



IX. 

THE EXPERIMENT OF THE UNION, WITH ITS PREPARATIONS. 

By T. D. WOOLSEY, D.D., LL.D. 

Moral and Historical Influences. — The English Colonies in America. — Auspi- 
cious Time of the Emigrations. — Equality" of Condition among the Set- 
tlers. — Preparations for Union. — The Confederation. — The Constituton. 
— Sectional Differences. — The Civil War. — Reconstruction. — Sources of 
Danger opened up by the War. — Concentration of Power in the Fed- 
eral Government. — Universal Suffrage. — The Influx of Foreigners. — 
Financial Delusions. — Political Corruption. — The Need and Hope of Re- 
form 260 



14 CONTENTS. 

X. 

EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS. 
By EUGENE LAWRENCE. 

Early* Attention given to the Subject. — The American Plan of Education. — 
Common Schools in New England. — The Struggle for Free Schools in New 
York. — The Sectarian Question. — The Common-school System in Pennsylva- 
nia. — Educational Institutions in the South. — Education and the Press. — 
The Educational Problem of To-day. — General Tendency of American Edu- 
cation Page 279 

XL 

SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 

I. THE EXACT SCIENCES. 

By F. A. P. BARNARD, D.D., LL.D. 

Aid rendered by Government to Scientific Investigation. — Scientific Associa- 
tions. — American Contributions to Mathematical Science. — Astronomy. — 
Physical Astronomy. — Comets. — Auroras. — Meteoric Astronomy. — Meteor- 
ology. — Sound. — Light and Heat. — The Spectrum. — Photography'. — Produc- 
tion of Cold. — The Microscope. — Electricity- and Magnetism.— Voltaic In- 
duction. — Magneto -electricity. — Induction Coils. — Static Electricity*. — 
Chemistry 294 

II. NATURAL SCIENCE. 

By Professor THEODORE GILL. 

First Steps. — Societies and Local Development. — General Explorations. — Min- 
eralogy. — Botany. — Zoology. — Paleontology. — Geology 337 

XII 

A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. , 
By EDWIN P. WHIPPLE. 

Colonial Thought as represented by Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Frank- 
on. — The Authors of the "Federalist:" Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. — 
Fisher Ames. — Poets, 1776-1810: Timothy* Dwight, Philip Freneau, John 
Trumbull, Francis Hopkinson, Robert Treat Paine, Jun., Joel Barlow. — 
Early- Writers of Fiction: Susanna Eowson, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, 
Charles Brockden Brown. — Theological Writers of the Calvinistic School. 
— Ethan Allen's " Reason, the Only Oracle of Man."— Tom Paine's Writings. 
—English Revival of Letters, 1810-1840.— Wordsworth's Influence in Amer- 
ica. — William Cullen Bry-ant. — Richard Henry Dana. — Washington Allston. 
— Washington Irving. — James Fenimore Cooper. — Joseph Rodman Drake. — 
Fitz-Greene Hai.leck.— James K. Paulding. — Reaction against' Puritanism 
and Calvinism in New England. — William Ellery' Channing. — Andrews Nor- 
ton. — Orville Dewey*. — John G. Palfrey. — Ralph Waldo Emerson. — Theo- 



CONTENTS. 15 

dore Parker. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. — John Greenleaf Whittier. 
— Oliver Wendell Holmes. — James Russell Lowell. — Julia Ward Howe.— 
Charles Sprague. — Nathaniel Parker Willis. — James G. Percival. — Edgar 
Allan Poe. — Bayard Taylor. — George William Curtis. — History and Biog- 
raphy: Jared Sparks, the Adamses, Hamilton, George Bancroft, Richard 
Hildreth, William H. Prescott, John Lothrop Motley, John Foster Kirk, 
George W. Greene, John W. Draper, James Parton, Henry Wilson, W. T. 
Sherman, George Ticknor, William R. Alger.— Political Orators : John C. 
Calhoun, Daniel Webster, Charles Sumner, Edward Everett, Abraham Lin- 
coln. — Essayists and Humorists : Henry D. Thoreau, A. Bronson Alcott, Walt 
Whitman, George H. Derby, Charles F. Browne, S. L. Clemens, Bret Harte, 
William D. Howells, Charles Dudley Warner, Thomas Bailey Aldrich. — Later 
American Novelists : Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Cather- 
ine M. Sedgwick, William Ware, R. B. Kimball, Donald G. Mitchell, Sylvester 
Judd, Thomas W. Higginson, Maria S. Cummins, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, J. W. 
De Forest, Edward Everett Hale, Louisa M. Alcott, Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, 
William G. Simms, Theodore Winthrop, J. G. Holland, Mary J. Holmes, Marian 
Harland, Augusta Evans Wilson. — Remarkable Poems. — Theological Writ- 
ers. — Miscellaneous Page 349 

XIII. 

PROGRESS OF THE FINE ARTS. 
By S. S. CONANT. 

Early American Artists. — John Watson and John Smybert. — Absence of Public 
Galleries of Paintings. — The American Art Union, 1839. — The National 
Academy of Design, New York City. — Academy of Art in Philadelphia. — 
Painting in Water-color. — The Artists' Fund Society. — Portrait - painters : 
Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, Charles Wilson Peale, J. W. Jarvis, 
Chester Harding, Gilbert Charles Stuart. — Prominent Palnters of the 
Present Century. — Historical Painters: John Trumbull, Washington All- 
ston, Emanuel Leutze. — Landscape Painters. — Genre Painters. — American 
Sculptors: Horatio Greenough, Thomas Crawford, Hiram Powers, J. Q. A. 
Ward. — Engraving. — Drawing on Wood. — Caricature 399 

Illustrations. — Paul Revere ; John Singleton Copley ; Benjamin West ; Gilbert Stuart ; Colonel 
John Trumbull; Alexander Anderson ; Rembrandt Peale; Washington Allstou ; Thomas Sully; Pro- 
fessor Morse ; Henry Iuman ; Thomas Cole; Horatio Greenough ; Hiram Powers ; Thomas Crawford ; 
John F. Kensett. 

XIV. 

MEDICAL AND SANITARY PROGRESS. 

By AUSTIN FLINT, M.D. 

Educational Institutions. — Medical Associations. — Medical Literature. — The 
Great Medical Events of the Century. — Vaccination. — Discovery of Aus- 
cultation. — Medical Use of the Thermometer. — American Contributions to 
Medical Progress. — Ovariotomy. — Hunter's Operation. — Beaumont's Obser- 
vations in relation to Digestion. — An.esthesia. — Important Improvements 
in Practical Surgery. — American Contributions to the Materia Medica. — 
General Indications of Progress 416 



16 CONTENTS. 

XV. 

AMERICAN JURISPRUDENCE. 

By BENJAMIN VAUGHAN ABBOTT. 

The American Library op Law. — Jurisprudence in Colonial Times. — Written 
Constitutions. — The Twofold System of Courts. — Our Admiralty Jurisdic- 
tion. — Patents and Copyrights. — Extradition of Criminals. — Bankruptcy. — 
The California Land Claims. — Rights of Married Women. — Homestead and Ex- 
emption Laws. — Mechanics' Lien Laws. — Protection of Animals. — Reformed 
Procedure. — Codes and Revised Statutes. — A Brief Retrospect Page 434 

XVI. 

HUMANITARIAN PROGRESS. 
By CHARLES L. BRACE. 

The Prisons. — Overcrowding of Former Prisons. — Imprisonment of Debtors. — 
Severity of Penalties. — County Prisons. — Reform of the Prison System in 
the United States. — Religious Instructions. — Secular Teaching. — Libraries. 
— The Treatment of Criminal and Unfortunate Children. — Prevention of 
Children's Crimes. — Treatment of Lunatics 454 

XVII. 

RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 

By the Rev. JOHN F. HURST, D.D. 

Religious Antecedents of the Early Settlers. — Love of Religious Liberty one 
of the Motives to Revolution. — Religion and Politics in the Revolution. — 
Independence of the Clergy. — Our Denominational Life. — The Protestant 
Bodies. — Roman Catholicism in America. — Home Missions. — Great Religious 
Revivals. — Practical Character of our Religious Developments. — The Uni- 
tarian Protest. — The School Question. — Conclusion 473 



THE FIRST CENTURY OF THE REPUBLIC. 



i. 



INTRODUCTION.— COLONIAL PROGRESS. 



FIFTY-ONE doubtful and divided men, 
of infinite variety in opinions, educa- 
tion, and character, met in the hot days of 
July, 1776, in that plain room at Philadel- 
phia where was decided the chief event of 
modern history, to found a republic. They 
were about to reverse all the inculcations of 
recent experience, and to enter at once upon 
a new era of uncertainty. From all the 
models of the past they could borrow little, 
and they overleaped barriers that had af- 
frighted all former legislators. Not Crom- 
well and Hampden, not the plebeians of 
Rome and the Demos of Athens, not the re- 
publicans of Venice nor the Calvinists of 
Holland and Geneva, had ventured upon that 
tremendous stride in human progress that 
would alone satisfy the reformers of Amer- 
ica. Educated in the strict conceptions of 
rank and caste which even Massachusetts 
had cultivated and Virginia carried to a 
ludicrous extreme, they threw aside the ar- 
tificial distinction forever, and declared all 
men equal. One sad exception they made, 
but only by implication. Rousseau had 
said that men born to be free were every 
where enslaved ; but Adams and Jefferson 
demanded for all mankind freedom and per- 
fect self-control. Yet still the same dark 
shade rested upon their conception of inde- 
pendence. But in all other matters they 
were uniformly consistent. In all other 
lauds, in all other ages, the church had been 
united to the state. The American reform- 
ers claimed a perfect freedom for every 
creed. Men trained in the rigid prelatical 
rule of Virginia and the rigorous Calvinism 
of Massachusetts joined in discarding from 
their new republic every trace of sectarian- 
ism. Religion and the state were severed 



for the first time since Constantine. Of the 
many important and radical changes that 
must take place in human affairs from the 
prevalence of the principles they enunci- 
ated a large part of the assembly were prob- 
ably unconscious. Yet upon one point in 
their new political creed all seemed to be 
unanimous. The people were in future to 
be the only sovereigns. The most heterodox 
of all theories to European reasoners, the 
plainest contradiction to all the experience 
of human history, they set forth distinctly, 
and never wavered in its defense. The En- 
glish Commons had been content to derive 
all their privileges from the condescension 
of the crown. The people of France were 
the abject slaves of a corrupt despotism. 
Two or three democratic cantons in Switzer- 
land alone relieved the prevalence of a rigid 
aristocracy. All over Germany, Italy, and 
Scandinavia the people were so contemned, 
derided, and oppressed as scarcely to de- 
serve the notice of the ruling classes. The 
few ruled over the many, and slavery was 
the common lot of man. Nor when the re- 
formers of America proclaimed the sover- 
eignty of the despised people, torn- and dis- 
membered by the tyranny of ages, could 
they hope to escape the reproach of wild 
enthusiasm, or to be looked upon as more 
than idle dreamers. 

Yet the chiefs of the republican party 
were men so resolute, pure, sagacious, as to 
deserve the esteem of the most eminent of 
the Europeans. Touched by a secret pang 
of admiration for an integrity which he did 
not share, the historian Gibbon, in the midst 
of a stately review of the miseries and the 
joys of all mankind, confessed the sentiment 
while he clung to his salary and his place. 



18 



INTRODUCTION.— COLONIAL PROGRESS. 



Robertson and Hume, bound to the scheme 
of royalty by pensions, honors, and official 
station, dropped a sigh for that independ- 
ence which they were never to know. Adam 
Smith lent the Americans a full and gen- 
erous sympathy. Fox, Burke, and Barre", 
Wilkes, and even Chatham, joined the brill- 
iant but narrow circle of the friends of 
America. On the Continent philosophers 
and poets, princes and statesmen, watched 
with a singular attention the revolt of the 
New World against the traditions of the 
Old. Voltaire from his Swiss retreat, or in 
the assemblies of Paris, rejoiced over "Frank- 
lin's republic." Vergennes was amazed at 
the blindness of the English ministry, and 
the folly of their king. And when the story 
of Bunker Hill and of the rising fame of 
Washington came like a sudden illumination 
over the Atlantic, all Europe began to study 
with critical interest the characters and the 
histories of the men who had already shown 
a consciousness of their natural rights and 
a power to defend them. The congress of 
deputies at Philadelphia was no longer an 
obscure and isolated assemblage ; it was 
plainly laboring upon a grand political prob- 
lem under the scrutiny of all mankind. 

In the following sketch of the progress of 
the colonies up to the period of freedom I 
shall endeavor to describe the country as it 
appeared to Adams and Jefferson, Chatham 
and Burke, its poor resources, its savage ter- 
ritory, its isolated and divided people. Noth- 
ing, indeed, gives us a clearer view of the 
mental vigor of our ancestors than that they 
should have foreseen and secured the union 
of so many distant settlements into, one 
grand nation, 1 and should have predicted 
with John Adams that the day of independ- 
ence was the opening of a new era of hope 
for millions yet to come. A notion had pre- 
vailed among Europeans that America could 
only be the parent of degenerate and feeble 
races. Buffon had suggested and Raynal 
confirmed the theory. No man of intellect- 

i " A voluntary association or coalition of the col- 
onies, at least a permanent one, is almost as difficult 
to be supposed; for fire and water are not more heter- 
ogeneous than the different colonies," says Burnaby, 
Pinkert., vol. xiii. p. 751. Yet in 1T42 Kalm saw the 
coldness of the people toward England. Pinkert, 
vol. xiii. p. 461. He was even told that in thirty or 
forty years they would form a separate, independent 
^tate. 



ual ability, no poet, philosopher, or states- 
man, Raynal said, has yet appeared in the 
New World. Franklin, Washington, the two 
Adamses, Jefferson, rose up before mankind 
almost while he spoke. Yet whoever sur- 
veyed the slow advance of civilization in 
the wilderness under the restraints and dis- 
couragements of the English control might 
scarcely wonder at the doubts of the French 
philosophers, or hardly see in the long chain 
of feeble settlements the future homes of civ- 
ilization. 

At the founding of the republic the colo- 
nists were accustomed to boast that their 
territory extended fifteen hundred miles in 
length, and was already the seat of a power- 
ful nation. But of this vast expanse the 
larger part even along the sea-coast was still 
an uninhabited wilderness. 1 Although more 
than a century and a half had passed since the 
first settlements in Massachusetts and Vir- 
ginia, only a thin line of insignificant towns 
and villages reached from Maine to Georgia. 
In the century since the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence a whole continent has been seamed 
with railroads and filled with people, but the 
slow growth of the preceding century had 
scarcely disturbed the reign of the savage on 
his native plains. On the coast the province 
of Maine possessed only a few towns, and an 
almost unbroken solitude spread from Port- 
land to the St. Lawrence. A few hardy set- 
tlers were just founding a State among the 
Green Mountains destined to be the home of 
a spotless freedom. In New York, still infe- 
rior to several of its fellow-colonies in popu- 
lation, the cultivated portions were confined 
to the bay and shores of the Hudson. The 
rich fields of the Genesee Valley and the Mo- 
hawk were famous already, but the savages 
had checked the course of settlement. It 
was not until many years after the war of 
independence that the fairest part of New 
York was despoiled of its wealth by a care- 
less agriculture. Schenectady was a front- 
ier town, noted for a mournful doom, and 
even Albany and Kingston were not wholly 
secure from the stealthy invasions of the In- 
dian. Pennsylvania, a frontier State, com- 
paratively populous and wealthy, protected 
New Jersey and Delaware from their as- 
saults; but Pittsburg was still only a mili- 

i Holmes, Annals. Bancroft. Gordon. Ramsay. 



THE COUNTRY AND THE PEOPLE. 



19 



tary post, and the larger part of the popula- 
tion of the colony was gathered in the neigh- 
borhood of the capital. 1 Woods, mountains, 
and morasses filled up that fair region where 
now the immense wealth of coal and iron 
has produced the Birmingham of America. 3 

The southern colonies had grown with 
more rapidity in population and wealth than 
New York and Pennsylvania. Virginia and 
the Carolinas had extended their settlements 
westward far into the interior. Some emi- 
grants had even wandered to Western Ten- 
nessee. Daniel Boone had led the way to 
Kentucky. A few English or Americans bad 
colonized Natchez, on the Mississippi. But 
the settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee lived 
with rifle in hand, seldom safe from the at- 
tacks of the natives, and were to form in the 
war of independence that admirable corps 
of riflemen and sharp-shooters who were 
noted for their courage and skill from the 
siege of Boston to the fall of Cornwallis. 
The Virginians were settled in the Tennes- 
see mountains long before the people of New 
York had ventured to build a village on the 
shores of Lake Erie or the Pennsylvanians 
crossed the Alleghauies. But still even Vir- 
ginia is represented to us about this period 
as in great part a wilderness. 3 Its own lands 
were yet unctdtivated, and its territory near- 
ly clothed in forests. And in general we may 
conclude that the true boundary of the well- 
settled portions of the allied colonies did not 
in any degree approach the interior of the 
continent. In the North the line of culti- 
vated country must be drawn along the 
shores of the Hudson River, omitting the dis- 
persed settlements in two or three inland 
districts. The Delaware and a distance of 
perhaps fifty miles to the westward included 
all the wealth and population of Pennsyl- 
vania. The Alleghanies infolded the ei\ il- 
ized portions of Virginia, and North and 
South Carolina can not be said to have 
reached beyond their mountains. So slowly 
had the people of North America made their 
way from the sea-coast. 

But little was known* of the nature of the 

1 Before 1795 there were few settlements north of 
the Ohio. Cincinnati had then only ninety-four cab- 
ins, and five hundred inhabitants. 

2 Hist. Col. Penn., Day, p. 59. 

3 Winterbotham, TJ. S., i. Great part of Virginia is 
a wilderness, says Burnaby, Pinkert, xiii. p. 716. 

4 Holmes. Bancroft. The French Jesuits had ex- 



country spreading from the borders of Penn- 
sylvania and Virginia to the Mississippi. It 
was called the Wilderness. It was usually 
painted in the fairest colors by those who 
had explored it. The table -laud near the 
Ohio was supposed to be one of the fairest 
and most fertile portions of the world j 1 the 
rich plains of Kentucky might support a na- 
tion ; and the forests, the meadows, and the 
valleys lay waiting to be possessed. But the 
fear of the savage still guarded the tempting 
region. The dark and bloody ground had 
no charm for the pacific settler ; the wilder- 
ness was pathless, and it was a journey of 
twelve days in wagons from Baltimore to 
Pittsburg. But of the immense and impen- 
etrable regions beyond the Mississippi our 
ancestors had scarcely formed a conception. 2 
It was a land of fable, where countless hosts 
of savages were believed to rule over endless 
plains, and to engage in ceaseless battles. 
Long afterward it was thought that the vast 
tide of the Missouri might in some way min- 
gle with the waters of the Pacific. 3 The great 
Northwest, now the granary of the world, 
the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, and the 
rivers of Columbia were all unknown ; nor 
could the most acute observer, shut up in 
the narrow limits of the Hudson and the Del- 
aware, suppose that within a huudred years 
the Atlantic would be joined to the Pacific 
by frequent highways, or that the frightful 
solitude beyond the great river would be 
the centre of a throng of vigorous republics. 
Within the cultivated districts a popula- 
tion usually, but probably erroneously, esti- 
mated at three millions were thinly scatter- 
ed over a narrow strip of land. The num- 
ber can scarcely be maintained. The New 
England colonies could have had not more 
than 800,000 inhabitants ; the middle colonies 
as many more ; the southern a little over a 
million. New York had a population of 



plored the country, and hoped to rule it. Parkman, 
Pioneers. 

1 "The Ohio," says Winterbotham, i. 189— twenty 
years later — " is the most beautiful river on earth ;" 
but as late as 1819 Michigan was thought to be a 
worthless waste, and Cass first explored its rich fields. 
Life of Cass, p. 79. 

2 St. Louis was settled in 1763, but was still a small 
frontier town, scarcely known to the colonists. 

3 New York Hist. Magazine, August, 1871. "The 
Missouri has been navigated for 2500 miles ; there ap- 
pears a probability of a communication by this chan- 
nel with the western ocean." This was said in 1803. 



20 



INTRODUCTION.— COLONIAL PROGRESS. 



248,000, and was surpassed by Virginia, 
Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Maryland, and 
was at least equaled if not exceeded by 
North Carolina. Its growth had been sin- 
gularly slow. The small population of the 
union was composed of different races and 
of almost hostile communities. There was 
a lasting feud between the Dutch at Albany 
and the people of New England, for it was 
believed that the former had held a corre- 
spondence with the Indians during the re- 
cent war, and purchased the spoil taken 
from the New England villages. The Ger- 
mans settled in Pennsylvania retained their 
national customs and language, and were al- 
most an alien race. Huguenot colonies ex- 
isted in several portions of the country. The 
north of Ireland had poured forth a stream 
of emigrants. Swedish settlements attract- 
ed the notice of Kalm along the Delaware. 
In North Carolina a clan of Highlanders had 
brought to the New World an intense loyal- 
ty and an extreme ignorance. The divisions 
of race and language offered a strong obsta- 
cle to any perfect union of the different col- 
onies. But a still more striking opposition 
existed in the political institutions of the 
various sections. In the South royalty, 
aristocracy, aud the worst form of human 
slavery had grown up together. In no part 
of the world were the distinctions of rank 
more closely observed, or mechanical and 
agricultural industry more perfectly con- 
temned. In New England the institutions 
were democratic, and honest labor was 
thought no shame. In the South episcopa- 
cy was rigorously established by law ; in 
New England a tolerant Puritanism hatl 
succeeded the persecuting spirit of Cotton 
Mather and Wiuthrop. 

In the period before the Revolution it was 
the custom to look upon the southern colonies 
as the land of wealth and material splendor. 
Their soil produced the chief exports of the 
New World; their system of agriculture, 
however abhorrent to the feelings of the 
more cultivated Northerner, was attended 
by a remarkable success ; their population 
grew rapidly; they held a ruling position 
among the colonies in the eyes of all stran- 
gers. Virginia had so far surpassed all the 
other colonies as to seem almost the mother 
and mistress of the whole. Her own people 
had named her the " ancient dominion," and 



her progress was so rapid as to suffer no hope 
that New York or Massachusetts could ever 
rival her wealth and power. The popula- 
tion of Virginia alone was half a million — 
more than twice that of New York. 1 Her 
exports of tobacco, com, and other produc- 
tions reached a value of nearly three mill- 
ions of dollars. Her ample territory was 
penetrated by navigable rivers, and it was 
supposed that the James and the Potomac 
must at some time form the outlets for the 
commerce of the West — a hope from which 
the Hudson seemed forever cut off by the 
difficulties of transport from Albany to the 
lakes. 2 But, with all its advantages, Virginia 
was weighed down by influences that care- 
ful observers saw must lead to a speedy 
decay. No colony, indeed, was apparently 
less likely to become the founder of a re- 
public and the patron of human equality. 
Through all its earlier history Virginia had 
been noted for its intense loyalty to the Stu- 
arts and its hatred of every element of re- 
form. The planters of Virginia ruled over 
their abject commonalty with a severity that 
the English aristocracy had never for many 
generations equaled. All those feudal re- 
strictions and abuses which the Massachu- 
setts colonists had come to the New World 
to avoid had been brought over to Virginia 
by its earlier settlers, and fostered into more 
than European strength. The church estab- 
lishment was supported by the colony, and 
all religious toleration was unknown, at least 
to the constitution. Nowhere had ecclesi- 
astical tyranny been so fostered by the gov- 
ernment. The industrial classes of Virginia 
had been kept by law in stolid ignorance, 
when Connecticut had enforced the educa- 
tion of all its citizens. Governor Berkeley 
had boasted, in 1671, that the colony had nei- 
ther printing-presses, colleges, nor schools, 
and had prayed there might be none there 
for at least a hundred years. His wish had 
nearly been fulfilled. In 1771 the common- 
alty of Virginia were noted for their igno- 
rance and brutality ; the gentry alone con- 

' Holmes, 1732, Annals and Note. The population 
of Virginia was estimated very differently by different 
observers ; but Holmes inclines to the largest num- 
ber. The census of 1T90 seems conclusive. It gives 
Virginia 876,000, while New York had but 340,120, 
Pennsylvania 434,373. See Ramsay. 

2 Winterbotham discusses the question, and decides 
in favor of the Potomac. 



VIRGINIA. 



21 



trolled the politics and managed the finances 
of the colouy. Virginia, too, had heen the 
first of all the colonies to import slaves, 1 and 
had set an example that had been too eager- 
ly followed. She had practiced both white 
and colored slavery. The English govern- 
ment had early made her borders a convict 
colony, and the records bear frequent ac- 
counts of highway robbers who had been 
reprieved that they might go to Virginia; 
and on one occasion London sends " one hun- 
dred of its worst disposed children, of whom 
it was desirous of being disburdened," to be 
apprenticed in the colony. 2 

The ruling class iu Virginia were the 
planters. They were often cultivated and 
intelligent men, who had been educated in 
English universities or in the best schools 
of their native land. Their possessions were 
immense, and had usually come to them 
from their ancestors. Entails prevented 
any division of the family property, and it 
was a common complaint at the time that 
all the land of Virginia was held by a few 
hands. Mechanical, agricultural, or com- 
mercial pursuits were forbidden by custom 
to the planting class. It was thought be- 
neath a member of the great families to en- 
gage in trade, and Scotch emigrants and for- 
eign adventurers pursued a gainful traffic, 
engrossing the wealth of the country, while 
the land-owner slumbered in indolence and 
fell into poverty on his ancestral estate. The 
towns of Virginia were small and wretched, 
fever-stricken and neglected. The wealth 
of the ruling families was wasted in build- 
ing immense mansions in the solitude of 
their plantations, where they emulated the 
splendors of the English country-seats, and 
exercised a liberal hospitality. One of the 
wealthiest of the lauded proprietors was 
Lord Fairfax, the early patron of Washing- 
ton. In his youth he had cultivated letters, 
and it was even rumored that he had writ- 
ten for the Spectator. His estate in Virginia 
contained more than five millions of acres. 3 
The fine mansion, Belvoir, seated among 



1 Gordon, i. 56. Mr. Bancroft has traced with his 
usual accuracy and force the course of this infamous 
traffic. Hildreth, i. 565. 

2 Calendar, State Papers, English, 1618, 1623, p. 10, 
118, 552. 

3 Sabine, Am. Royalists. Fairfax and Sparks. Life 
of Washington. 



the fairest scenery of the Potomac, where 
he lived with his brother, and Greenway 
Court, which he built in the Shenandoah 
Valley, where he died, in 1782, were scenes 
of frequent festivity. But the accomplished 
lord was ardently loyal ; his property, val- 
ued at £98,000, was confiscated at his death, 
and the land he had selfishly withheld was 
divided among the people. The fair widow 
whom Washington had wooed and won with 
stately assiduity was also a large landed 
proprietor. But the Revolution broke up 
the system of entails, and gave a new im- 
pulse to the prosperity of the colony. 

Notwithstanding the establishment of 
episcojiacy, the growth of dissent had been 
rapid iu Virginia, and at the opening of the 
colonial struggle the Dissenters were more 
numerous than Churchmen. That valuable 
race, the Scotch-Irish, had settled in large 
numbers within its borders. Education, too, 
had made some progress. William and Ma- 
ry's College, sluggish as had beeu its advance, 
had sent out many cultivated men. Liberal 
principles and a love of freedom had never 
been wanting to the people. Eminent Vir- 
ginians had already become shocked at the 
fatal results of slavery, aud there were no 
stronger advocates of abolition than Jeffer- 
son aud Lee. Throughout the whole colony 
there was a plain desire for enlarged polit- 
ical progress, and, happily for Massachusetts, 
her wrongs were felt nowhere more deeply 
than among the Virginia reformers. Nor 
was the project of independence any where 
more favorably received than by that large 
class of the population who had felt in their 
own lives the evils of a tyrannical govern- 
ment. Her immense territory, which reach- 
ed, at least in theory, over the mountains to 
the Mississippi, and through the whole val- 
ley of the Ohio, her wealth and commerce, her 
population, greater than that of any other 
colony, and, above all, the rare abilities and 
patriotism of her citizens, made Virginia the 
centre of reform, and perhaps the most effect- 
ive instrument in binding the whole coun- 
try into a perfect union. Happy had she 
followed the teachings of Jefferson 1 aud the 
example of Carter, and destroyed slavery 
when she cast aside feudalism. 



' Jefferson proposed the abolition of slavery in Vir- 
ginia, but found it expedient to withdraw his project. 



22 



INTRODUCTION.— COLONIAL PROGRESS. 



Less corrupted by European traditions 
than Virginia — a laud where the Euglish 
aud the German, the Swiss, the Scotch-Irish, 
Quakers, the children of Skye, and the sad 
hosts of Africa were mingled strangely to- 
gether — North Caroliua had early shown a 
wider liberality of thought than her power- 
ful neighbor. Caste and rank had less prev- 
alence ; her people were industrious, and her 
prosperity great. North Carolina was al- 
ready the fifth colony in importance; the 
population reached nearly two hundred and 
fifty thousand. 1 South Carolina, less popu- 
lous, but with nearly twice as many slaves as 
whites, was noted for the haughty manners 
of its planters, the ignorance of its people, 
the high education of some of its leading- 
men, their open dislike for slavery. No 
South Caroliuiau of any intelligence at this 
period but lamented that so dark a stain rest- 
ed upon his native colony. Maryland, too, 
possessed a weight in the country in 1775 that 
must seem strange to the modern politician. 
It possessed a larger population than either 
New York or the Caroliuas. Its Roman 
Catholic planters were sometimes intelli- 
gent aud liberal. Maryland still belonged 
to the heir of the Calvert family, but its 
people cared little for a degenerate race 
whose early excellence had faded away. A 
colony of Scots from the north of Ireland 
had settled at Baltimore, and were probably 
of greater value to the rising State than 
most of its planters and all its proprietors. 
But slavery, an established church, 2 a pro- 
prietary government, a rigid division of 
rank and caste, had apparently linked Ma- 
ryland so closely to Virginia and the South 
in politics as to give little room for the 
progress of freedom. It was, indeed, the 
first colony to express a wish to withdraw 
the declaration of independence when sud- 
den reverses fell upon the republican armies. 

The four New England colonies, separa- 
ted from the South by an immense distance, 
and a journey of many days, aud sometimes 
weeks, by sea or land, were altogether dif- 
ferent from their ueighbors in politics. 3 



> I have usually adopted Ramsay's numbers, which 
seem confirmed by the first census, i. 146. 

a Episcopacy was rigorously established in Mary- 
land after 16S8. 

3 Dwight, New England, paints some years later the 
virtues of his countrymen. In Connecticut, he says, 



Two of them, Connecticut and Rhode Isl- 
and, were free from all internal control from 
England, elected their own governors, and 
practiced a democratic republicanism. 1 In 
Connecticut, at least, all men were already 
equal, all were educated, and slavery was 
abolished practically. In Massach usetts the 
governor was appointed by the English king, 
but his salary was regulated by the province ; 
yet the Massachusetts people had been rapid- 
ly advancing in political knowledge ; mental 
cultivation had always marked their chief 
men. Their Puritan clergy had produced 
many of the early authors of America; they 
were usually wise, austere, and patriotic. 
Liberty, even in that imperfect form in 
which it existed under a colonial rule, had 
shown its fairest results in New England. 
The people were prosperous, the govern- 
ment well administered, the courts pure, the 
clergy respected, the general morality above 
that of any other community. The senti- 
ment of human equality had already pre- 
vailed over the influence of Euglish caste 
and Puritan theocracy; a bold, free nation 
had arisen, not quite so numerous as the 
Dutch, who had defied the arms of Philip 
II., or the Swiss, who had overthrown the 
Hapsburgs, yet capable even alone of found- 
ing a republic that not all the powers of the 
Old World could overthrow. Its population 
was purely English, its manners republican 
and plain, its people accustomed to labor 
aud to reflect. 

The middle colonies were less democratic 
than New England. New York, like Vir- 
ginia, had been weighed down by a sys- 
tem of entails and by immense landed es- 
tates that limited immigration. It is stated 
that the German colonists were so badly 
treated by its land-owners that they imbibed 
a lasting hostility for its people, moved away 
in large bodies to Pennsylvania, and pre- 
vailed upon all their countrymen to follow 
them. They hoped to make Pennsylvania a 
new Germany. 2 A kind of colonial aristocra- 
cy had grown up in New York. Its Dutch 

" there is a school-house sufficiently near every man's 
door," i. 17S. See Hildreth, i. 508. 

» Palfrey, New England, ii. 567, 568, notices the un- 
exampled liberality of the two charters. 

2 Large numbers of Scotch-Irish also came to Penn- 
sylvania about 1773. Holmes, Ann., ii. 187. They 
came from Belfast, Galway, Newry, Cork, 3500, with 
no love for England. 



COLONIAL PROGRESS IN AGRICULTURE. 



23 



population were, however, attached to free- 
dom, and the presence of a royal governor 
and council had not teuded to iucrease the 
respect for English institutions. Strong 
religious differences had already agitated 
the people. The Episcopal Church was op- 
posed to the Presbyterian, and Calvinism 
led on the way to independence. In Penn- 
sylvania the proprietary government was 
conservative, and opposed to violent meas- 
ures. New Jersey, rich, highly cultivated, 
and prosperous, was strongly affected by its 
Presbyterian college at Princeton, and was 
naturally opposed to prelatical Eugland. It 
is indeed curious to notice how largely the 
religious element entered into the dispute 
between the king and the colonies. 1 The 
English revolution of 1688 was re-enacted 
in America, and King George dethroned be- 
cause it was feared that he meant to assail 
the consciences of the people. Men felt that 
should the king succeed in conquering them, 
he would have a prelate in every colony, and 
a rigid rule against progressive dissent. In 
the middle colonies the Presbyterians led 
the way to freedom ; in the southern the 
liberal Churchmen, Huguenots, and Scotch 
Presbyterians. Thomas Paiue, in his famous 
argument for separation, relied much upon 
the fact that the people of America were in 
no sense English, but rather a union of dif- 
ferent races met for a common purpose in 
1 the New World, and resolute chiefly to be 
free. It was this common aim that produced 
that harmony which was so seldom inter- 
rupted between the various inhabitants of 
the different colonies, aud which formed 
them at last into one nation. 

In the course of a century within their 
narrow fringe of country the colonists had 
transformed the wilderness into a fertile aud 
productive territory. 3 Agriculture was tin ir 
favorite pursuit. Travelers from Europe 
were struck with the skill with which they 
cultivated the rich and abundant soil, the 
fine farm-houses that filled the landscape, 
the barns overflowing with harvests, the cat- 
tle, the sheep. The northern and middle 



1 J. Adams to Morse, December 2, 1815; and see 
Gordon, i. 143. Mr. Whitefleld tells the colonists in 
1764 their danger. 

2 Burnaby, Pinkert., xiii. 731, notices the flourishing 
condition of Pennsylvania, and observes that its court- 
eous people are "great republicans." 



colonies were famous for wheat and corn.' 
Pennsylvania was the granary of the nation. 
In New Jersey the fine farms that spread 
from Trenton to Elizabethtown excited the 
admiration of the scientific Kami. 2 Long 
Island was the garden of America, and all 
along the valleys opening upon the Hudson 
the Dutch and Huguenot colonists had ac- 
quired ease aud opulence by a careful agri- 
culture. The farm-houses, usually built of 
stone, with tall roofs and narrow windows, 
were scenes of intelligent industry. While 
the youug men labored in the fields, the 
mothers and daughters spun wool and flax, 
and prepared a large part of the clothing of 
the family. The farm-house was a manu- 
factory for all the articles of daily use. 
Eveu nails were hammered out in the win- 
ter, and the farmer was his own mechanic. 
A school and a church were provided for al- 
most every village. Few children were left 
untaught by the Dutch dominie, who was 
sometimes paid iu wampum, or the New En- 
gland student, who lived among his patrons, 
and was not always fed upon the daintiest 
fare. On Sunday labor ceased, the church- 
bell tolled in the distance, a happy calm set- 
tled upon the rural region, aud the farmer 
and his family, in their neatest dress, rode 
or walked to the village church. The farm- 
ing class, usually intelligent and rational, 
formed in the northern colonies the sure re- 
liance of freedom, and when the invasion 
came the Hessians were driven out of New 
Jersey by the general rising of its laboring 
farmers, and Burgoyne was captured by the 
resolution of the people rather than by the 
timid generalship of Gates. 

The progress of agriculture at the South 
was even more rapid aud remarkable than 
at the North. The wilderness was swiftly 
converted into a productive region. The 
coast, from St. Mary's to the Delaware, with 
its inland country, became withiu a century 
the most valuable portion of the earth. Its 
products were eagerly sought for in all the 
capitals of Europe, and one noxious plant 
of Virginia had supplied mankind with a 
new vice and a new pleasure. It would be 

i Burnaby, p. 734. " The country I passed through," 
he says of New Jersey, "is exceedingly rich aud beau- 
tiful." 

= Kalm, Pinkert, vol. xiii. p. 448, notices the rich 
farms near Trenton. 



24 



INTRODUCTION.— COLONIAL PROGRESS. 



useless to relate again the story of the growth 
of the tobacco trade. Its cultivation in Vir- 
ginia was an epoch in the history of man. 
Tobacco was to Virginia the life of trade 
and intercourse ; prices were estimated in 
it; the salaries of the clergy were fixed at 
so many pounds of tobacco. All other prod- 
ucts of the soil were neglected in order to 
raise the savage plant. Ships from England 
came over annually to gather in the great 
crops of the large planters, and Washington, 
one of the most successful of the Virgiuia 
land-owners and agriculturists, was accus- 
tomed to watch keenly over the vessels and 
their captains who sailed up the Potomac to 
his very dock. 1 The English traders seem 
to have been often anxious to depreciate his 
cargoes and lower his prices. Virginia grew 
enormously rich from the sudden rise of an 
artificial taste. From 1624, when the pro- 
duction of tobacco was first made a royal 
monopoly, uutil the close of the colonial pe- 
riod the production and the consumption 
rose with equal rapidity, and in 1775, 85,000 
hogsheads were exported annually, and the 
sale of tobacco brought in nearly $4,000,000 
to the southern colonies. 2 This was equal to 
about one-third of the whole export of the 
colonies. Happily since that period the 
proportion has rapidly decreased, and more 
useful articles have formed the larger part 
of the export from the New World to the 
Old. 

One of these was rice. A Governor of 
South Caroliua, it is related, had been in 
Madagascar, and seen the plant cultivated 
in its hot swamps. 3 He lived in Charleston, 
on the bay, and it struck him that a marshy 
spot in his garden might well serve for a 
plantation of rice. Just then (1694) a ves- 
sel put in from Madagascar in distress, 
whose commander the Governor had former- 
ly known. Her wants were liberally re- 
lieved. In gratitude for the kindness he re- 
ceived the master gave the Governor a bag 
of rice. It was sown, and produced abun- 
dantly. The soil proved singularly favora- 
ble for its culture. The marshes of Georgia 
and South Carolina were soon covered with 
rice plantations. A large part of the crop 

> Washington to his factor?. 

2 Pitkin, Commerce U. S. Doyle, American Colo- 
nies, 1869, has gathered together many useful details. 

3 The legend is told by Pitkin, 101, and Ramsay. 



was exported to England. In 1724, 100,000 
barrels were sent out from South Carolina 
alone. In 1761, the value of its rice crop 
was more than $1,500,000. Its white popu- 
lation could not then have been more than 
45,000, and it is easy to conceive the tide of 
wealth that was distributed annually among 
its small band of planters. They built cost- 
ly mansions on the coasts and bays, lived in 
fatal luxury, were noted for their wild ex- 
cesses, and often fell speedy victims to the 
fevers of the malarious soil. Indigo, sugar, 
molasses, tar, pitch, and a great variety of 
valuable productions added to the wealth 
of the South. But cotton, which has grown 
through many vicissitudes to be the chief 
staple of British and American trade, was, 
at this period, only cultivated in small quan- 
tities for the use of the farmers. It was 
spun into coarse cloths. But it was not un- 
til Whitney's inveution, in 1793, that it could 
be readily prepared for commerce, and to the 
inventive genius of Connecticut the South- 
ern States owe the larger part of their wealth 
and political importance. 

Extensive as had been the results of the 
labors of the American farmer at this period, 
he had achieved the conquest of the wilder- 
ness in the face of dangers and obstacles 
that seemed almost overwhelming. None 
of the appliances of modern agriculture lay 
at his command. His tools were rude yet 
costly, his plow a heavy mass of iron, his 
cattle expeusive, and at first scarcely to be 
obtained. The fevers and malaria of the 
new climate, the sharp frosts, the unknown 
changes, even the not infrequent earthquakes 
and celestial phenomena, must have covered 
him with alarm. Before him lay the dark 
and pathless wilderness, behind him the 
raging seas. A whole ocean separated him 
from his kind. In front the savage hovered 
over the advancing settlements, and not sel- 
dom filled the thin line of cultivated country 
from Albany to Savannah with the tidings 
of fearful massacres. Often the frontier 
families came flying from their blazing 
homes, scarred and decimated, to seek shel- 
ter from the unsparing foe. Yet more cruel 
or more unfriendly than the terrors of the 
wilderness, the climate, or even the sav- 
age, seemed to the colonists the conduct of 
their royal government in England. In- 
stead of aiding the struggling settlers in 



ENGLISH RESTRICTIONS ON COMMERCE. 



25 



their contest for lite, it had treated them as 
objects of suspicion and dislike. A fear that 
they might plan at some future time a sepa- 
ration from the mother country governed all 
the English legislation. 1 Hence laws were 
early imposed upon them that might well 
have checked the whole progress of their 
agriculture. They were forced to purchase 
all their supplies from England. They were 
scarcely permitted to have any commercial 
intercourse with any foreign country, or even 
with each other. 2 They were obliged to send 
all their tobacco, sugar, indigo, rice, furs, ores, 
pitch, and tar directly to England, and there 
accept the price the English traders were 
willing to give. It was forbidden them even 
to send their produce to Ireland. These jeal- 
ous restrictions must have kept many an acre 
from being planted, and prevented that rap- 
id progress which free trade could alone in- 
cite. Franklin showed clearly that in this 
way the colonies had always paid a heavy 
tax to England, of far greater value than 
any stamp act could ever give, and that the 
English merchants and traders had already 
grown rich by the onerous burdens they had 
laid on America. 3 Had the colonial ports 
been opened to foreign traffic, every article 
must have risen in price, or the demand for 
it increased beyond conception. But the 
English had always treated the colonists 
with a severity like that which Spain once 
practiced in South America, and which she 
now exercises over the Creoles of Cuba. Cor- 
rupt and worthless Englishmen were sent out 
as governors, councilors, judges, and even 
clergymen. They looked with disdain on 
the colonists they plundered, and hastened 
back to England to defame the reputation 
of the abject race. It is plain that most 
Englishmen looked upon the Americans as 
serfs. They had no rights that Parliament 
could not abrogate, and no security even 
for their own earnings. England plunder- 
ed the American farmer almost at will, 
and robbed of his just profits the sturdy 
laborer in the valleys of Vermont, and the 

1 England now treats her colonies with the gentle- 
ness advised by Burke and Franklin, and her authors 
condemn the old tyranny as strongly as Americans. 
Mr. Doyle, of Oxford, has produced a careful essay on 
the progress of the colonies, 1S69. 

2 Ships might sail for wines to Madeira and some 
Spanish ports, under certain restrictions. 

3 Franklin to Shirley, December, 1754. 



wealthy rice planter in the swamps of South 
Carolina. 

The commerce of the colonies flourished 
equally with their agriculture. It was chief- 
ly in the northern colonies that ships were 
built, and that hardy race of sailors formed 
whose courage became renowned in every 
sea. But the English navigation laws 
weighed heavily upon American trade. Its 
ships were, with a few exceptions, only al- 
lowed to sail to the ports of Great Britain. 
No foreign ship was suffered to enter the 
American harbors. The people of England 
were resolved to prevent all foreign inter- 
ference in the trade of the colonies, and the 
American ports were rigidly shut out from 
the commerce of the world. Isolated from 
the great centres of traffic, and even from 
exchanging many articles with each other, 
bound by a most oppressive monopoly, re- 
strained by a selfish policy, the colonists yet 
contrived to build large numbers of ships, 
and even to sell yearly more than a hun- 
dred of them in England. The ship-yards 
of New England were already renowned. 
Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were 
seats of an important trade. Ou the island 
of Nantucket the whale-fishery had been es- 
tablished that was to prove for a brief pe- 
riod the source of great profit, and a school 
of accomplished seamen. The spermaceti- 
whale was still seen along the American 
coast, but the New England whaler had 
already penetrated Hudson Bay, and even 
pierced the antarctic. The Revolutionary 
War broke up the trade, and the English 
captured two hundred of its ships, besides 
burning the oil stored on the island. 1 In 
consequence of the rigid navigation laws, 
smuggling prevailed along all the American 
coast, and swift vessels and flaring sailors 
made their way to the ports of France and 
Spain to bring back valuable cargoes of 
wine and silks. Boston was the chief seat 
of ship-building, and its fast-sailing vessels 
were sent to the West Indies to be exchanged 
for rum and su,y;ar. In 1743 2 it was estima- 
ted that New England employed one thou- 
sand ships in its trade, besides its fishing 
barks. But when the laws were more strict- 
ly enforced, the shipping trade of Boston de- 



1 Pitkin. Mrs. Farrar's Recollections, p. 2, whose 
father was a chief sufferer. 2 Holmes, Annals, 1743. 



26 



INTRODUCTION.— COLONIAL PROGRESS. 



(•lined. British war vessels watched the co- 
lonial ports, and cut off that large source of 
wealth which the colonists had found in an 
illicit commerce with Spain and the West 
India Islands, and it was with no kindly 
feeling that New England and New York 
saw the gainful traffic destroyed which had 
brought them iu a stream of French and 
Spanish gold. 1 The rude English officials 
not seldom made illegal seizures. Every cus- 
tom-house officer was turned into an inform- 
er, and no cargo seemed altogether secure. 
There was no redress except in an appeal to 
England. Yet the American commerce still 
flourished, even within the narrow limit to 
which it was confined, and the colonists bore 
with admirable patience the exactions and 
restrictions to which they were subjected in 
order that New York and Boston might not 
compete with London and Bristol. In fact, 
the navigation laws had prevented altogeth- 
er that natural and healthy growth which 
might have made the colonial sea-ports even 
in 1775 considerable cities. But twenty-four 
thousand tons of shipping were built in the 
colonies in 1771, and the whole exports were 
in 1770 three millions of pounds sterling, and 
the imports about two and a half millions. 
It was noticed that the value of the tobacco 
exported was one-fourth larger than that of 
the wheat and rye. 2 The rise of American 
commerce had seemed wonderful to Burke, 
Bane", and all those Englishmen who were 
capable of looking beyond the politics of 
their own narrow island ; but no sooner had 
America become free than its trade doubled, 
trebled, and soon rose to what in 1775 would 
have seemed incredible proportions. New 
York, Boston, and Philadelphia became at 
once large cities, and England was enriched 
by American freedom. 

One gainful source of traffic to the coloni- 
al and British merchants had been the slave- 
trade. Immense numbers of these unwill- 
ing emigrants were forced upon the colonial 
markets, chiefly by the inhuman policy of 
England. A strong feeling of disapproba- 
tion fur this species of merchandise had ear- 
ly grown up in the minds of the Americans, 
and Pennsylvania, New England, and even 
South Carolina were anxious to discourage 
it by imposing a heavy tax on slaves. But 



1 Gordon, i. 153. 



2 M'Pherson. Pitkin, p. 11. 



the English Parliament abrogated all their 
humane legislation. No sentiment of Chris- 
tian mercy seems to have moved the bishops, 
lords, and accomplished statesmen who held 
the control of the American trade. The En- 
glish merchants insisted upon their mon- 
strous traffic. In one year six thousand 
slaves were brought to South Carolina; fif- 
teen thousand were forced upon all the colo- 
nies. It is at least an indication of the 
higher degree of civilization to which the 
inhabitants of the New World had attained 
that they were the first to exclaim against 
the horrors of slavery, and that they taught 
the English intellect one of the most strik- 
ing principles of modern progress. If in 
any particular men have risen beyond the 
cruel selfishness of the earlier ages, it is in 
the recognition of the principle that human 
slavery shall no more be tolerated. The 
Peunsylvauians as early as 1713 protested 
against the barbarous traffic. 1 One of the 
chief grievances of New England was that 
the English were resolute to force slaves 
upon them ; and when the colonies became 
free, they proceeded at once to indicate 
a period after which no more Africans 
should be imported into America. They 
were the first to fix the ban of civilization 
upon an infamous traffic, which had been 
sanctioned by the usages of all ages. If 
they did not abolish slavery itself, it was be- 
cause the cruel legislation of English states- 
men had implanted the evil so deeply in the 
midst of the new nation that nothing but a 
fearful civil convulsion could eliminate and 
destroy it. 

In manufactures the colonists can be said 
to have made but little progress. The En- 
glish government had rigorously forbidden 
them to attempt to make their own wares. 
A keen watch had been kept over them, and 
it was resolved that they should never be 
suffered to compete with the artisans of En- 
gland. The governors of the different colo- 
nies were directed to make a careful report 
to the home government of the condition of 
the colonial manufactures, in order that they 
might be effectually destroyed. 2 From their 
authentic but perhaps not always accurate 
survey it is possible to form a general cou- 

i Memoirs Hist. Soc. Penn., vol. i. part i. p. 362. 
George Fox had always disapproved of slavery. 
2 Report of Board of Trade. 



PROGRESSIVE MANUFACTURE. 



27 



ception of the slow advance of this branch 
of labor. South of Connecticut, we are told, 
there were scarcely any manufactures. The 
people imported every thing that they re- 
quired from Great Britain. Kami, indeed, 
found leather made at Bethlehem, in Penn- 
sylvania, as good as the English, and much 
cheaper. He praises the American mechan- 
ics; but, in general, we may accept the re- 
port of the governors that all manufactured 
articles employed in the family or in trade 
were made abroad. Linens and fine cloths, 
silks, implements of iron and steel, furniture, 
arms, powder, were purchased of the London 
merchants. But this was not always the 
case in busy New England. Here the jeal- 
ous London traders discovered that iron 
foundries and even slitting-mills were al- 
ready in operation ; that fur hats were manu- 
factured for exportation in Connecticut and 
Boston ; that the people were beginning to 
supply their own wants, and even to threat- 
en the factories of England with a danger- 
ous rivalry. The English traders petitioned 
the government for relief from this colonial 
insubordination, and Parliament hastened to 
suppress the poor slitting-mills and hat 
manufactories of our ancestors by an express 
law. 1 The hatters, who seem to have espe- 
cially excited the jealousy of their London 
brethren, were forbidden to export hats even 
to the next colony, and were allowed to take 
only two apprentices at a time. Iron and 
steel works were also prohibited. Wool and 
flax manufactures were suppressed by strin- 
gent provisions. American factories were 
declared "nuisances." No wool or manu- 
facture of wool could be carried from one 
colony to another; and, what was a more 
extraordinary instance of oppression, no 
Bible was suffered to be printed in America. 2 
Under this rigid tyranny American manu- 
factures had sunk into neglect. Massachu- 
setts had ventured to offer a bounty on 
paper-making, and some Scottish-Irish had 
introduced the manufacture of linen ; iron 
furnaces had been erected in various parts of 
the country, and its immense mineral wealth 
was not altogether unknown. But it is safe 
to conclude that from Maine to Georgia no 
species of artistic manufactures existed with- 
in the colonial limits. The farm-house and 



i Pitkin, T. 



2 Bancroft, v. 266. 



the spinning-wheel were the only centres of 
a native industry which the British Parlia- 
ment could not suppress. Of those two 
great sources of American progress, coal and 
iron, the latter had assumed some impor- 
tance. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Vir- 
ginia had begun to produce pig-iron in an 
imperfect state. The ore might be exported 
to England, and even Ireland, and it was 
already known that the colonies could pro- 
duce such large quantities of the metal as 
would supply their own wants, aud perhaps 
those of Europe. 1 As they were not suffered 
to manufacture even a nail or a pin, a wheel 
or a plow, England made immense profits by 
returning the raw irou to America in various 
articles of trade. Coal was known to exist 
within the colonies, and was mined in Vir- 
ginia. 2 Speculative observers foresaw the 
day when furnaces and factories might 
spring up along the banks of the Delaware 
and the Potomac, and the mineral wealth of 
the country be made to contribute to the 
prosperity of the colonies. But of that im- 
mense and inexhaustible store-house of the 
finest coal the world possesses which lies in 
the Lehigh Valley and upon Mauch Chunk 
Mountain our ancestors could have had no 
conception. No one supposed that beneath 
the rude and pathless forest, on lands that 
seemed destined to perpetual sterility, cov- 
ered with savages, and terrible even to the 
hunter, there lay mines richer than Golcon- 
da, and stores of wealth beyond that of Oi- 
muz and the Ind. Or had any statesman of 
1775 ventured to predict that on the site of 
Fort Pitt, in the heart of a terrible wilder- 
ness, at the junction of two impetuous 
streams, was to spring up, within a century, 
a city where coal and iron, lying together in 
its midst, should be the source of a bound- 
less opulence, he would have lost forever all 
reputation for discretion. The journey from 
the Delaware to Pittsburg was long the ter- 
ror of the Western settler. 

It was long after the Revolution that a 
hunter who had been out all day on Mauch 

1 Kalm, Pinkert., xiii. p. 473. Pennsylvania, he 
thought, could supply all the globe with iron, so eas- 
ily was it procured. " But coals have not yet been 
found in Pennsylvania [p. 405], though people pretend 
to have seen them higher up," he says. 

2 M'Parlane, Coal Regions. The mines near Rich- 
mond were worked long before the anthracite bed ot 
Pennsylvania was discovered, p. 514. 



28 



INTRODUCTION.— COLONIAL PEOGRESS. 



Chunk Mountain, and had found no game, 
and who was returning weary and disheart- 
ened to his cahin, with no means to purchase 
food for his family, struck with his foot as 
he passed along a black crystal. He stooped 
and examined it. 1 The first specimen of that 
priceless mineral which has transformed the 
wilderness into a populous nation, and con- 
tributed to the comfort of millions, lay be- 
fore him. The rain fell fast. The hunter 
was tired and hungry. Yet he took up the 
apparently worthless stone and carried it 
with him to his cabin. Mauch Chunk then 
lay bare aud bleak, the haunt of wild beasts 
and savage men, and had not the hunter pre- 
served his shining mineral, might still have 
hidden its secret stores for another decade. 
He showed the specimen to a friend ; it was 
taken to Philadelphia. The mountain was 
explored, and a company formed to work the 
mine. But it was at first unsuccessful, and 
many years elapsed before Pennsylvania be- 
came conscious of its hidden treasures, and 
discovered that it possessed mines richer 
than those of the Incas and perennial fount- 
ains of industrial progresSo The unlucky 
discoverer, it seems, reaped little profit from 
his good fortune. His land was taken from 
him by a prior claim. He died in poverty. 
Great companies, possessed of enormous cap- 
ital, and spanning with their combined rail- 
roads half the continent, now encircle the 
Mauch Chunk Mountain with their avenues 
of trade. Coal has been found heaped upon 
the sides of the hills, and compressed in huge 
masses in the valleys. The richest and al- 
most the only bed of anthracite in the world 
has been discovered beneath the path of the 
solitary hunter. 

The wild men of the woods and marshes 
were to our ancestors objects of interest as 
well as terror. 2 In the earlier period of the 
colonial history their numbers had been ex- 
aggerated, and it was believed that a hun- 
dred thousand painted savages might at 
some moment throw themselves on the white 
settlements. But it was found at length 
that one nation was alone formidable, and 
that an Indian empire had risen beneath the 
shadows of the forest that resembled in its 

i Mem. I'cnn. Hist. Soc, i. part ii. p. 317. 

2 The Indians had the vanity of all feeble intellects, 
and thought themselves the superiors of all mankind. 
Colden, i. 3. 



extent, its cruelty, and its love of glory the 
most renowned of European sovereignties 
and conquerors. In the seventeenth century 
the Six Nations had their seat in that fair 
and fertile portion of New York that reaches 
from Albany to Lake Erie. Onondaga was 
their capital. A single sachem ruled with un- 
disputed authority over the obedient league. 1 
A passion for conquest and a love of martial 
fame had led this singular confederacy to 
exploits of daring that seem almost incred- 
ible. They held in a kind of subjection all 
the territory from Connecticut to the Mis- 
sissippi. The wild tribes of Long Island 
obeyed the commands of Onondaga; and 
even the feeble Canarsie, on its distant 
shore, trembled at the name of the Mohawk. 
Under the shade of the endless forests, over 
the trackless mountains, and across rapid riv- 
ers, the war parties of the Six Nations had 
pressed on to the conquest of Pennsylvania 
and New Jersey, and all Virginia yielded to 
their arms. 2 They fought with the Chero- 
kees on the dark and bloody ground of Ken- 
tucky. The Illinois fled before them on the 
fair prairies, now the granary of the conti- 
nent. The savages seem to have resembled 
the extinct races whose bones are found in 
the prehistoric caves of Kent and Dordogue. 
They were cruel, aud rejoiced in the tortures 
of their captives. Their wigwams were 
filthy and smeared with smoke, adorned with 
scalps, and hung with weapons of war. Cun- 
ning aud deceit formed a large part of their 
tactics. They rejoiced td fall upon their ene- 
mies by night and massacre the flying in- 
habitants of the blazing wigwams. Yet in 
their rude society the savages manifested 
the elements of all those impulses and pas- 
sions that mark the civilization of Europe. 3 
They were fond of fine dress, and their wom- 
en produced rich leather robes, glittering 
with decorations in colored grasses and 
beads, head coverings, adorned with feath- 
ers, and moccasins of singular beauty. They 
danced, they sang, with a skill, vigor, and 
precision that Taglioni might have envied 
or a Patti approved. The Iroquois boast- 

i Schoolcraft, Notes on the Iroquois, p. 88. Onon- 
daga was the seat of government from the earliest 
period. 

2 Morgan, League of the Iroquois, p. 13. They pen- 
etrated to Virginia in 1607 ; in 1660-1700 the French 
assailed them. 

3 Schoolcraft, 135-139. Morgan, 384. 



THE INDIANS. 



29 



ed that they had themselves invented twen- 
ty-six different dances. They exchanged 
visits from wigwam to wigwam, and prac- 
ticed a courtesy that might have instructed 
Paris. They had their orators, who polished 
their sentences with the accuracy of Cicero. 
With a simple faith they worshiped the Su- 
preme Spirit ; and yearly, in February, when 
the germs of life were opening, met to re- 
turn thanks to their Maker that he had 
preserved their lives for another year. A 
white dog was sacrificed, prayers were of- 
fered, hymns of thanksgiving sung, 1 and 
on the wild shores of the Seneca or Cayuga 
lake a natural worship hallowed the savage 
scene. 

Of the numbers of the Indian tribes it is 
of course impossible to form any exact esti- 
mate. But it is believed that in the height 
of their power the Six Nations never possess- 
ed more than seventeen thousand warriors, 
and that in the year 1774 they had scarcely 
two thousand. Their whole number was 
then estimated at ten thousand souls. 2 Their 
wars with the French and with the native 
races had rapidly reduced their strength. 
It was stated by Tryon at this time that the 
wilderness from Lake Erie to the Mississip- 
pi could furnish twenty-five thousand war- 
riors, and was inhabited by one hundred 
and thirty thousand Indians. In the South 
the Cherokees were the ruling race, and 
might, with their allies, produce several 
thousand men. It was with these fierce and 
relentless warriors that the English hoped 
to devastate the long line of frontier settle- 
ments from Lake Ontario to the Savannah. 
Twenty thousand Indians, it was thought, 
would fall upon the unprotected colonists, 
and with the scalping knife and the musket 
force them to submit to the British king. 
Nothing more incited the colonies to inde 
pendence than this unheard-of barbarity. 
It was when all the distant settlements were 
threatened by an Indian invasion that they 
resolved upon perfect freedom ; and even the 
patient Washington when he heard the news 
could not restrain his malediction upon the 
cruel tyraut, and urged au instant separa- 



' Morgan, 39. They even confessed their sins of the 
past year, we are told. Their belief in witchcraft, 
omens, dreams, is told by Schoolcraft, p. 141. They 
had a vampire, he thinks. 

2 Campbell, Tryon County, p. 24 and note. 



tion. 1 In periods of peace the Indians had 
afforded the colonies au important branch 
of trade. Furs and skins were exported in 
large quantities to Europe, and the most 
successful trappers were the Six Nations, 
who brought their wares to Albany, and the 
less warlike tribes who dealt with the mer- 
chants of Fort Pitt. Gold and silver were 
of no value to the savages. They would 
only receive their payment in wampum or 
strings of shells 2 — a currency that passed 
freely over all the continent — or in powder, 
shot, and muskets, rum, and sometimes arti- 
cles of dress. A fine uniform or a glitter- 
ing coat was sometimes exchanged for large 
tracts of land. A string of periwinkle shells, 
purple or white, was valued at a dollar ; and 
the first church in New Jersey, it is related, 
was built and paid for from contributions 
in wampum. 3 New York and Albany in 
the early Dutch period had almost adopted 
the currency of the savage. There are, in- 
deed, marked traces of the influence of In- 
dian customs and superstitions among the 
whites. Their omens, dreams, and intense 
belief in witchcraft, their incantations and 
spells, seem to have convinced Cotton Mather 
and the New England divines of their close 
connection with the spirit of evil,* and help- 
ed to increase the sense of a present Satan 
in the neighboring forests. To the wild 
hunters of the border the savages taught 
their keen study of nature, their caution, 
and their impassiveness. The frontiers-meu 
borrowed their moccasins, hunting shirts of 
leather, and caps, their patience of cold and 
hunger, and rivaled them at last in the pur- 
suit of game. At the close of the Revolu- 
tion the power of the Six Nations was broken 
forever. They had taken the side of the En- 
glish, except only the friendly Oneidas, .and 
the last of the Mohawks found a refuge in 
Canada. 5 The other tribes sold their pos- 
sessions, and nearly all moved away. Can- 
andaigua, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, gave 
names to flourishing white colonies from 
New England, and with the destruction of 

1 Washington to Reed. Reed, Original Letter, p. 66. 
He denounces "the tyrant and his diabolical minis- 
try." 2 Schoolcraft, p. 358. 

3 Colden, i. 11, notices that they had no slaves. They 
adopted the captives they saved alive. 

4 Satan was believed to haunt the New England 
woods in the form of a "little black man." Cotton 
Mather. s Morgan, p. 30. 



30 



INTRODUCTION.— COLONIAL PROGRESS. 



the Indian rule New York rose rapidly to the 
first place in population and power among 
its sister States. 

Next to the Indians, along that wide fringe 
of border land that skirted the banks of the 
Hudson, the declivities of the Alleghanies, 
and the western counties of the Carolinas on 
the brink of the Wilderness, lived the hardy 
race of the pioneers. The home of the woods- 
man was usually a log-cabin ; his chief wealth 
his musket and a family of healthy chil- 
dren. Far away from the centres of civili- 
zation, more familiar with the manners of 
the wigwam than of the city, generous, fan- 
ciful, fond of nature, and of the trees and riv- 
ers, mountains and plains, around him, al- 
ways ready for change and new adventure, 
the pioneer lived in ceaseless excitement, 
and sank at last to rest under the green sod 
of some untried land. His life was, indeed, 
never secure from the treacherous assaults 
of the wild men of the woods. The Indians 
were as fickle as they were mobile and act- 
ive. The pioneers, trained in constant 
watchfulness, produced some of the most 
noted and possibly the most eminent of the 
men of the Revolution. Washington him- 
self was in his early youth educated in the 
arts of frontier life. Poor, self-instructed, 
accurate, 1 truthful, at nineteen he had as 
a surveyor studied the wilderness west of 
the Alleghanies, and learned the life of the 
woods. At a later period he traveled on foot 
with a pack on his shoulders from Winches- 
ter to the Ohio, through the heart of the for- 
est. Later still he led the provincial troops 
through the woods and mountains, and be- 
came famous as a commander; and when 
the fate of freedom rested on him alone, his 
experience in the forest and the wilderness 
guided him to the victories of Trenton and 
Princeton. Daniel Boone, the founder of a 
State, was a more accurate example of this 
wayward class. From his cottage on the 
Yadkin, where, surrounded by wife, children, 
and comparative ease, he might well have 
lived content, an irresistible desire to ex- 
plore the mysterious wilderness drew him 
away. He climbed the tall Cumberland 
Mountains, and saw with a kind of rapture, 
he relates, the lovely plains of Kentucky, 

1 The careful drawings of the self-taught Washing- 
ton show the methodical nature of his mind. See 
Sparks, Life. 



the buffaloes cropping the rich meadows, the 
flowers blooming in the waste. 1 He descend- 
ed iuto the paradise, was captured by some 
Indians, Avho came upon him and his compan- 
ion from a cane-brake, escaped, was found 
by his brother in the wilderness, to his un- 
speakable joy ; and when his brother left him, 
built a hut, and lived alone, he declares, in 
inexpressible happiness. From the summit 
of some commanding hill he delighted to 
trace the windings of the Kentucky through 
its ample plains, or hunted for his daily food 
through the teeming woods. " Through an 
uninterrupted scene of sylvan pleasures," he 
writes, "I spent my time." 2 He resolved 
to return to North Carolina for his family, 
and found a settlement iu the smiling waste. 
He sold his farm. With wife and children 
and a small band of settlers, he climbed 
again the wild Cumberland Mountains. The 
Indians attacked the small party, his son fell 
iu battle, but the ardent pioneer persisted in 
his vision, and founded Boonesborough, on 
the banks of the Kentucky, in the wilderness 
he loved so well. A small stockade was built. 
It was attacked by the Indians. Booue was 
taken prisoner iu a warlike expedition, but in- 
stead of torturing him, the Shawanese adopt- 
ed him into their tribe and treated him as a 
brother. Again he escaped, aud in his wood- 
en fort at Boonesborough sustained a siege 
that had nearly proved successful. The sav- 
ages were repulsed, peace aud liberty came 
together, and the bold pioneer died in the 
scene he had looked upon with rapture, the 
founder of a new nation, and surrounded by 
a grateful people. 3 

Such were the men who led the way to 
the frontier settlements, who first crossed 
the Alleghanies, who penetrated beneath the 
shadow of Lookout Mountain, or ventured 
into Cherry Valley, when the Six Nations 
still ruled over Western New York. They 
formed a long line of isolated colonies, and 
disputed with the savages the possession of 
the wilderness. Behind them, protected by 
their necessary vigilance, the more peaceful 
settlers cultivated their ample farms and 
lived in prosperous ease. Yet the border 



1 Filson*s Kentucky. Boone's Narrative. 

2 Narrative, p. 36. 

3 Filson, p. 49. " He lived at last," it is said, " in 
peace, delighted by the love and gratitude of his coun- 
trymen." 



THE CLERGY. 



31 



land was never safe from a hostile invasion. 
When the English first incited the savage 
tribes to a general rising the whole frontier 
was penetrated by a series of murderous at- 
tacks. The settlers on the outskirts of North 
and South Carolina fled from their blazing 
homes or perished in an unsparing massa- 
cre. The Indians who followed Burgoyne 
filled New York with slaughter. Vermont 
and New Hampshire* trembled before their 
threats. Cherry Valley armed in its de- 
fense. 1 The fate of Wyoming has been told 
in immortal song. The shores of the Hud- 
son were no longer safe. Brandt and his 
band of savages penetrated into Orange 
County, and the massacre of Minisiuk alarm- 
ed the Huguenot farmers in the rich valleys 
of the Shawaugunk and the Dutch in the 
hill country around Goshen. As the savages 
pressed on into Orange County they came to 
a school-house which was yet filled with its 
children. They took the school -master into 
the woods and killed him. They clove the 
skulls of several of the boys with their tom- 
ahawks ; but the little girls, who stood look- 
ing on horror-struck and waiting for an in- 
stant death, were spared. A tall savage — it 
was Brandt — dashed a mark of black paint 
upon their aprons, and when the other sav- 
ages saw it they left them unharmed. Swift 
as an inspiration the little girls resolved to 
save their brothers.'" 1 They flung over them 
their aprons, and when the next Indians 
passed by they were spared for the mark 
they bore. The school-master's wife hid in 
a ditch and escaped. It was amidst such 
dangers that our ancestors founded their 
new republic, and forced on the course of 
progress. 

Within the more cultivated portions of the 
country the most influential person in every 
town was usually the clergyman. In New 
England the authority of the ministers was 
no longer what it had been in the days of 
Cotton and the Mathers. A revolt had taken 
place against the spiritual hierarchy which 
had opened the way for intellectual freedom. 
But the New England pastor was distin- 
guished always for virtues and attainments 
that gave him a lasting prominence. In his 



1 Campbell, Tryon County, is full of the trials of 
frontier life. 
a Eager, Orange County, p. 391. It was July, 1T79. 



youth he had passed through a spiritual ex- 
ercise which had fixed him in the path of 
virtue. He examined his own nature with 
the accuracy of a Pythagorean. He had 
laid down rules to himself that formed the 
guiding principles of his life. Sloth he ab- 
horred ; he resolved to lose no moment of 
time ; to do nothing that he should be afraid 
to do in his last hour; to consecrate him- 
self to the service of his Maker. 1 The image 
of ideal virtue had dawned upon him in its 
surpassing loveliness, and he wandered away 
into the still woods and pleasant fields filled 
with sweet visions of the divine Messiah. 
Yet he knew that the world was full of 
trouble and vexation, and that it would nev- 
er be another kind of a world. It was thus 
that Jonathan Edwards meditated in the 
dawn of his intellectual youth, and many 
another ardent follower of Calvin. The 
New England minister was fond of scholas- 
tic theology. He keenly pursued the deli- 
cate and refined distinctions of election and 
grace, of free-will and predestination, but 
seldom wandered far from the decisions of 
the Geneva school. Yet he had learned self- 
control, and was well fitted to direct the 
ci induct of others. Elected by the voice of 
the people to the ministry of a town or city 
congregation, his scholarship and his decis- 
ion gave him a political and personal influ- 
ence that he was not afraid to use. 2 The 
clerical families were often connected by 
the closest ties of relationship, and the pas- 
torate descended from generation to genera- 
tion. The Cottons and Mathers ruled over 
Boston for nearly sixty years. Edwards was 
the grandson of a clergyman, succeeded to 
his charge, married a clergyman's daughter, 
and married his own daughter to the Rev. 
Aaron Burr. Yet the people of Northamp- 
ton, where he was settled, with the largest 
salary in New England, rebelled against his 
authority. He removed to Stockbridge, and 
became at last president of the College of 
New Jersey on the death of his son-in-law, 
Burr. 

These cultivated men were usually ardent 



1 Edwards, Diary and Life. 

2 The minister was sometimes obliged to rule bis 
people with no tender hand, and violent controversy 
often arose, which sometimes "came to hard blows." 
Life of Edwards, i. 464. The people of Northampton 
were of "a difficult and turbulent temper,"' etc. 



32 



INTRODUCTION.— COLONIAL PROGRESS. 



patriots. But their patriotism was no doubt 
stimulated by the dread of a religious rather 
than political tyranny. A fear prevailed in 
all New England that Parliament and the 
king were resolved to impose bishops upon 
each of the colonies, and to enforce by law 
the ritual of the Church of England. White- 
field had warned the colonies of a coming 
woe. The imprudent conversation of young 
Episcopal ministers in Connecticut and Bos- 
ton added to the apprehension. Archbishop 
Seeker had suggested the idea of an Amer- 
ican episcopate, 1 and the project was al- 
ready entertained in England of reduciug 
New England to a subjection to the nation- 
al Church by lavish bribes to its independ- 
ent clergy, and by the reform or suppression 
of all the colonial charters. Cambridge had 
even been suggested as the seat of a colonial 
bishop, and an Episcopal church had already 
sprung up beneath the shadow of Harvard 
College under the auspices of the Society for 
Propagating the Gospel in America. Then 
Mayhew of Boston began a series of publica- 
tions that sounded an alarm throughout the 
country. He felt the danger; he saw the 
unscrupulous nature of the men who ruled 
in England. The " overbearing spirit of the 
Episcopalians" 2 he brooded over, until he 
almost felt once more the clerical tyranny 
from which the gentle Robinson had fled, 
and which had impelled the Mayflower over 
the stormy sea. " Will they never let us 
rest in peace," he cried, " except where all 
the weary are at rest V Is it not enough 
that they persecuted us out of the Old 
World V Yet Mayhew was still sufficiently 
loyal to hope that King George was " too 
good and noble" to suffer it. When the 
controversy with England began, Mayhew 
was ever ready to support the liberties of 
his country, and his pulpit resounded with 
patriotic exhortations. Almost every Con- 
gregational minister was equally faithful. 
Like the Huguenot and the Covenanter, they 
even fought in the ranks, and sometimes led 
their townsmen to battle, and fell among the 
first. 

The clergy of the middle and southern col- 
onies were persons less distinctly the leaders 



1 Gordon, i. 143, gives the general apprehension and 
the plan. 2 Mayhew, Second Defense, p. 64. 

3 Observations, p. 156. 



of the people than in New England. The 
Episcopalian ministers were often mild and 
amiable men who cared nothing for politics. 
They were inclined to the English rule, but 
were not unwilling to share the fortunes of a 
new nation. Some, however, were bitter and 
relentless in their Toryism ; their violeuce 
helped to bring discredit on their cause, and 
their religious intolerance led them to their 
ruin. In New York tlie Dutch and Presby- 
terian clergy were often eminent for their 
virtues and their scholarship; their churches 
in the city were to the eyes of our ancestors 
splendid, their salaries high, their congrega- 
tions numerous and attentive. The Presby- 
terian church in Wall Street, the new Dutch 
church, and even the old, were scarcely sur- 
passed by Trinity and St. Paul's. Meantime 
a new religious influence had been impressed 
upon the nation by the preaching of White- 
field, and in 1742 a revival had swept over 
the country that never lost its effect. Vil- 
lages and cities had been stirred by the im- 
pulse of reform. Many strange and some not 
attractive scenes had followed it. Children 
held their meetings for prayer apart. 1 Wom- 
en had been roused to unreflecting fanati- 
cism, and imposture and hypocrisy had flour- 
ished in the general excitement. Yet it was 
acknowledged that every where morality 
had received a real impulse at the hands of 
faith. The clergy themselves profited by 
the general movement, and became better 
fitted to guide the people. The Roman 
Catholic clergy at this period had lost much 
of their early intolerance. The Society of 
the Jesuits had been abolished, a series of 
moderate aud reputable popes had ruled at 
Rome, and reform seemed about to invade 
the councils of the Vatican. The fanatical 
reaction of the nineteenth century had not 
yet begun. 

In the towns and villages the lawyers 
shared with the clergy the intellectual influ- 
euce of the time. Many of them were well- 
read and accomplished men, who joined to 
their technical knowledge a considerable ac- 
quaintance with letters, or were noted for 
their natural eloquence. John Adams had 
prepared himself by a careful study of his 
profession to defend with legal accuracy the 
rights of his countrymen. William Smith, 

1 Edwards, Life. 



CHIEF CITIES. 



33 



of New York, was known as a faithful his- 
torian as well as jurist, and formed the in- 
tellect of John Jay. Colden wrote well. 
In Virginia Patrick Henry had won his first 
renown by an impassioned appeal against 
the avarice and the ambition of the Estab- 
lished Church. Jefferson had trained him- 
self by practice in the courts before he es- 
sayed to condense in a brief memorial the 
rights of man. Nothing indeed is more re- 
markable at this period than the nicety and 
clearness with which the various points in 
dispute between the colonies and England 
were discussed in every part of the country, 
and the superiority in argument which the 
legal writers of America showed over their 
opponents in London when they treated of 
the professional elements of the controversy. 
Otis and Adams reasoned with calmness and 
force, while Johnson raved and Mansfield 
blundered. In the grand argument which 
the American lawyers addressed to the suf- 
frages of the civilized world there was a 
depth of reflection and a wide acquaintance 
with the principles of the common and in- 
ternational law that proved to acute observ- 
ers their just claim to freedom. No one 
could think such men unworthy to found a 
state. 

The chief cities of our ancestors were all 
scattered along the sea-coast. There were 
no large towns in the interior. Albany was 
still a small village, Schenectady a cluster 
of houses. To those vast inland capitals 
which have sprung up on the lakes and 
great rivers of the West our country offered 
no parallel. Chicago and St. Louis, the cen- 
tres of enormous wealth and unlimited com- 
merce, had yet no predecessors. Pleasant 
villages had sprung up in New England, 
New Jersey, and on the banks of the Hud- 
son, but they could pretend to no rivalry 
with those flourishing cities which lined the 
sea-coast or its estuaries, and seemed to our 
ancestors the abodes of luxury and splendor. 
Yet even New York, Philadelphia, and Bos- 
ton, 1 extensive as they appeared to the colo- 
nists, were insignificant towns compared to 
the European capitals, and gave no promise 
of ever approaching that grandeur which 
seemed to be reserved especially for London 

> Burnaby describes Boston as the most cultivated 
of the American cities. Dwight thinks New York 
" magnificent" at a later period. 
3 



and Paris. In 1774 the population of New 
York was perhaps 20,000 ; that of London 
600,000. The latter was thirty times larger 
than the former, and in wealth and political 
importance was so infinitely its superior that 
a comparison between them would have 
been absurd. Boston, which has crowned 
Beacon Hill, pressed over the Neck, and even 
covered with a magnificent quarter a large 
surface that was once the bed of the Charles 
Eiver, was in 1774 a town of 15,000 or 18,000 
inhabitants, closely confined to the neigh- 
borhood of the bay. The Long Wharf may 
still be seen on the ancient maps ; the Com- 
mon was used as a public resort ;* the Han- 
cock House was illuminated at the repeal 
of the Stamp Act, and the Sons of Liberty 
raised on the Common a pyramid of lamps, 
from the top of which fire-works lighted 
up the neighboring fields. But Beacon 
Hill was still used by its owner as a gravel- 
pit, and it was feared by the citizens that 
he might level it altogether. The Boston 
of 1774, which proclaimed freedom and de- 
fied the power of England, would scarcely 
rank to-day among the more important coun- 
try towns. New York was more populous, 
but it was still confined to the narrow point 
of land below the Park. The thickly built 
part of the town lay in the neighborhood of 
Whitehall. Some fine houses lined Broad- 
way and Broad Street, 2 but to the west of 
Broadway green lawns stretched down from 
Trinity and St. Paul's to the water. Trees 
were planted thickly before the houses ; on 
the roofs railings or balconies were placed, 3 
and in the summer evenings the people 
gathered on the house-top to catch the cool 
air. Lamps had already been placed on the 
streets.* Fair villas covered the environs, 
and even the Baroness Riedesel, who had 
visited in the royal palaces of Europe, was 
charmed with the scenery and homes of the 
citizens. Extravagance had already cor- 
rupted the plainer habits of the earlier pe- 
riod. The examples of Loudon and Paris 
had already affected the American cities. 
The people of New York drank fiery Madeira, 

i Drake, Boston, 685. 

2 Riedesel, Mem., iii. 170, etc. 

3 Kalm. Riedesel, Mem., iii. 170. Watson, Annals 
New York, p. 227. A stage ran to Philadelphia in 1776. 

4 New York, Miss Mary L. Booth. Gordon, i. 138, 
notices the heavy taxes of Boston— higher than those 
of London. 



34 



INTRODUCTION.— COLONIAL PROGRESS. 



and were noted for their luxury. Broadway 
was thought the most splendid of avenues, 
although it ended at Chambers Street. And 
twenty years later, when the City Hall was 
built, it was called by Dvvight (a good schol- 
ar) the finest building in America. 1 The 
streets of New York and Boston were usual- 
ly crooked and narrow, but the foresight of 
Penn had made Philadelphia a model of reg- 
ularity. Market and Broad streets were am- 
ple and stately. The city was as populous 
as New York, and perhaps the possessor of 
more wealth. It was the first city on the 
continent, and the fame of Franklin had al- 
ready given it a European renown. 2 Yet 
Philadelphia when it rebelled against George 
III. was only an insignificant town, clinging 
to the banks of the river ; and New York in- 
vited the attack of the chief naval power of 
the world with its harbor undefended and 
its whole population exposed to the guns of 
the enemy's ships. The southern cities were 
yet of little importance. Baltimore was a 
small town. Virginia had no large city. 
Charleston had a few thousand inhabitants. 
Along that immense line of sea-coast now 
covered with populous cities the smallest of 
which would have made the New York and 
Boston of our ancestors seem insignificant, 
only these few and isolated centres of com- 
merce had sprung up. The wilderness still 
covered the shores of Long Island, New Jer- 
sey, Delaware, and the Carolinas almost as 
in the days of Raleigh. 

To pass from one city to another along 
this desolate shore was, in 1775, a long and 
difficult journey. Roads had been early 
built in most of the colonies. In Massachu- 
setts they were good, except where they 
passed over the hills. In New York a good 
road ran through Orange and Ulster coun- 
ties to Albany. That between New York 
and Philadelphia was probably tolerable. 
In the southern colonies but little attention 
was paid to road -building, and even those 
in the neighborhood of Philadelphia were 
often almost impassable. A stage-coach ran 
in two days from New York to Philadelphia, 
but the passengers were requested to cross 
over the evening before to Powle's Hook, 
that they might set out early in the morn- 

1 Dwight, Travels, iii. 329, notices the magnificent 
style of living, etc. 
3 Watson, Philadelphia. 



ing. 1 Sloops sailed to Albany in seven or 
eight days. 2 From Boston to New York was 
a tedious journey. In fair weather the roads 
of the time were tolerable ; but in winter 
and spring they became little better than 
quagmires. There was therefore but little 
intercourse between the people of the dis- 
tant colouies, and in winter all communica- 
tion by land and water must have been near- 
ly cut off. Had it been told to our ances- 
tors that within a century men would ride 
from New York to Philadelphia within three 
hours, or pass from the Atlantic to the Pa- 
cific in seven days, that the passage from 
Boston to Charleston would be made within 
three days, or from Liverpool to New York 
within ten, they would have placed no more 
confidence in the prediction than in the 
speculations of Laputa. Nor did they dream 
that Franklin's discoveries had made the 
closer union of the human race still more 
certain. The northern cities were usually 
built of brick or of stone, and many of the 
farm-houses were of the latter material. 3 
The former had been imported from Holland 
for the first New York buildings ; and even 
Schenectady, a frontier town, was so purely 
Dutch as to have been early decorated with 
Holland brick. In the country stone was 
easily gathered from the abundant quarries 
on the Hudson or along the New Eugland 
hills. Many large, low, stone houses, with 
lofty roofs and massive windows, may still 
be seen in the rich valleys opening upon the 
Hudson, almost in the same condition in 
which they were left by their Huguenot or 
Dutch builders, and apparently capable of 
enduring the storms of another century.* 
Brick-making was soon introduced into the 
colonies, and the abundant forests supplied 
all the materials for the mechauic. Fortu- 
nately no palaces were built, no royal parks 
required, no Versailles nor Marly indispensa- 
ble to our ancestors, no monasteries, no ca- 
thedrals. A general equality in condition 
was nearly reached. Not five men, we are 



i Advertisement, The Flying Post. Watson, Ann. 
Phil., p. 257, notices the bad roads. 

2 Trumbull, Mem., p. 26. 

3 Kalm. Burnaby. Mr. Stone's valuable edition of 
the Riedesel memoirs throws much light upon the con- 
dition of the colonies. 

* Early New York (1669) " was built chiefly of brick 
and stone, and covered with red tiles." Brodhead, 
New York, ii. 153. 



MANNERS AND MORALS. 



35 



told, in New York and Philadelphia expend- 
ed ten thousand dollars a year on their fam- 
ilies. The manners of the people were sim- 
ple ; their expenses moderate. Yet nowhere 
was labor so well rewarded nor poverty so 
rare. Franklin, who had seen the terrible 
destitution of England and of France, pro- 
nounced his own country the most prosper- 
ous part of the globe, and was only anxious 
to protect it from that tyranny which had 
reduced Europe to starvation, and snatched 
their honest earnings from the hands of the 
working classes. He saw that those who 
labored were the best fitted to govern. The 
wages of the farm laborer in the northern 
colonies was probably three times that of 
the English peasant, and the general abun- 
dance of food rendered his condition easier. 
Fuel, however, before the discovery of coal, 
seems to have been sometimes scarce and 
dear. Kalm notices that complaints of its 
dearness were frequent in Philadelphia — 
now the seat of the chief coal market of the 
world. 1 Wines and liquors were freely con- 
sumed by our ancestors, and even New En- 
gland had as yet no high repute for temper- 
ance. Rum was taken as a common restor- 
ative. The liquor shops of New York had 
long been a public annoyance. In the far- 
ther southern colonies, we are told, the 
planter began his day with a strong glass 
of spirits, and closed it by carousing, gam- 
bling, or talking politics in the village 
tavern. Our ancestors were extraordi- 
narily fond of money, if we may trust the 
judgment of Washington, who seems to have 
found too many of them willing to improve 
their fortunes from the resources of the im- 
poverished community. 2 But in general it 
must be inferred that the standard of pub- 
lic morals was not low. In comparison 
with the corrupt statesmen of England and 
France, or with the members of the English 
Parliament, who were nearly all willing to 
accept and to give bribes, the American pol- 
iticians seemed to the European thinkers 
the most admirable of men. Washington 
rose above his species, and Franklin, Sam- 
uel and John Adams, Jefferson, Gadsden, and 
Lee were wise and prudent beyond example. 
Our generals and soldiers, when compared to 

i Pinkert, xiii. 40T. 

2 Washington to Reed, Reed's Original Letters, p. 



those England sent over to conquer them, 
were evidently of a higher and purer race. 
Burgoyne, 1 Howe, and the greater part of 
their associates shocked the rising refine- 
ment of colonial society by their gross vices 
and shameless profligacy as much as by their 
inhumanity. Gates, Arnold, and Lee, who 
imitated them, were exceptions to the gen- 
eral purity of the American officers, and of 
these two were English -born and one a 
traitor. 

The desire for a higher and purer life was 
indeed the finest trait of American politics 
and society. The Declaration of Independ- 
ence embodied the real feeling of the people. 
They were anxious to promote human equal- 
ity, to enforce the common brotherhood of 
man, to cultivate refinement, to escape from 
the gross vices of mediseval barbarism which 
still covered all Europe. They had learned 
the necessity of religious and political toler- 
ation by the slow course of experience. In 
the opening of their history religious tolera- 
tion had been uuknown. New England had 
persecuted Episcopalians, Quakers, Dissent- 
ers. Stuyvesant, in New York, had sent 
Quakers in chains to Holland, and been re- 
proved by his superiors at the Hague. Vir- 
ginia was bitterly intolerant, and by the 
boasted constitution of Maryland in 1649 
the Socinian was deemed worthy of death, 
and whoever reproached the Virgin Mary 
was fined, imprisoned, or banished. 2 But 
these harsh laws were gradually swept away, 
and in 1775 a practical toleration prevailed 
in all the colonies. No one of any intelli- 
gence any longer desired to propagate his 
faith by penal laws. An equal progress had 
been made in politics. Virginia was willing 
to abandon its entails and its oligarchy ; 
Massachusetts to assert a democratic equal- 
ity ; New York to break down its colonial 
aristocracy forever. All the colonies united 
in throwing aside the restrictions of Euro- 
pean prejudice, and by a remarkable revo- 
lution provided for the creation of a re- 



1 Riedesel, Mem., iii. p. 125. Lord Auckland was 
constantly intoxicated. Burgoyne and his mistress 
spent half the night drinking Champagne while his 
troops were starving. Such were the morals England 
taught to the colonies. 

2 Bozman, Maryland. Lord Baltimore probably 
hoped to make Maryland a purely Roman Catholic 
colony, but in 1649 England would not permit it, i. 
p. 351 ; ii. p. 662. 



36 



INTRODUCTION.— COLONIAL PROGRESS. 



public, in which the people should be the 
only rulers. 

I shall conclude this imperfect sketch by 
a brief review of the intellectual condition 
of America. It had produced no Sbakspeare 
nor Milton, it possessed no poets and histo- 
rians ; but it is quite probable that the North- 
ern States of America were better educated 
in the ideas of Milton and Sbakspeare than 
even Englaud or France. Of the people of 
New England the larger proportion could 
read and write, while of the two centres of 
European civilization the great majority of 
the population were sunk in hopeless igno- 
rance. From the dawn of its history New 
England had insisted that its people should 
all be educated; and New York and Penn- 
sylvania had not lingered far behind it. 1 
Connecticut imposed a heavy hue upon ev- 
ery father of a family who had neglected to 
teach his household the elements of knowl- 
edge, 2 Massachusetts had enforced a similar 
provision, and even South Carolina had di- 
rected a school to be planted in every town- 
ship. It was the aim of the New World to 
open the minds of all its people to the light 
of literature, and to cultivate the whole com- 
munity. It sought mental as well as polit- 
ical equality. But in France aud Englaud 
the royal governments found no leisure and 
had little inclination to teach their people. 
It was only in Protestant Holland and Ger- 
many that men were yet allowed to learn 
the " sweet influences" of a rule of letters. 

In their eager and resolute desire to make 
knowledge free to all, our ancestors at once 
planted in the wilderness the printing-press. 
Three years bad not passed after the land- 
ing of the first colony in Pennsylvania when 
the clank of the machine that had reformed 
•Europe aud discovered America resounded 
under the shade of the primeval forest. 5 It 
was with knowledge rather than arms that 
the followers of Penn hoped to found their 
state ; and nearly fifty years earlier Massa- 
chusetts had erected its first printiug-press 
at Cambridge, and had consecrated New En- 

' Ramsay, i. 26. Palfrey, ii. 45. 

2 Ramsay, i. 78. In Connecticut the parent neglect- 
ing education was fined twenty shillings. Baroness 
Riedesel noticed that all the women of New England 
could read. The Virginians of the back country she 
finds ignorant and " inert." They sometimes exchange 
wives, are cruel to their slaves ; but she was no friendly 
judge. 3 Thomas, Printing, and Bancroft. 



gland to literature and thought. Our an- 
cestors were plainly resolved that the New 
World should be a land of printers. Pam- 
phlets, sermons, political pieces, resounded 
through the wilderness, and at an early pe- 
riod Cotton Mather alone had printed in 
England and America three huudred and 
eighty-two of his own productions. In the 
opening of the eighteenth century (1704) a 
weekly paper, The News Letter, was publish- 
ed at Boston. 1 It was then the only news- 
paper printed in British America. It was a 
foolscap half sheet, and was thought suffi- 
cient to contain all the news of the day. In 
1725 William Bradford issued at New York 
the New York Gazette, a foolscap sheet. The 
two Franklins, James aud Benjamin, edited 
at Boston the New England Courant; and 
suits for libel, imprisonment, aud fines were 
the reward of several of the early editors. 
James Franklin was in jail for four weeks ; 
Zenger, of the New York Courant (1733), was 
also soon in the grasp of the law. But 
through all its early trials the printing- 
press passed successfully. The newspaper 
became as necessary to the colonists as their 
daily food. In 1775 four were printed in New 
York, and as many each in Philadelphia and 
Boston. The free school proved the best 
ally of the printer, and popular education 
laid the foundation of a nation of readers. 
The power of the press was soon manifested. 
Reform and revolution followed in its path. 
Yet the rude machine at which Franklin and 
Bradford labored seemed to lag behind the 
wants of even an early age ; to print a few 
hundred copies of a small sheet required in- 
cessant toil ; and Faust himself must have 
looked with amazement aud awe upon one 
of those giant printing-presses that in our 
day consume their miles of paper, pour forth 
ten thousand huge sheets of accurate typog- 
raphy every hour, and relate the story of 
mankind. 2 

Various colleges or schools for the high- 
er education of the people had already been 
planted in America. Harvard had long held 
a high renown even in Europe, and had been 

1 Mr. Hudson, in his interesting account of Ameri- 
can journalism, notices a previous newspaper, in 1690, 
which had the unusual fate of lasting only one day, 
p. 44. 

2 The invention of Hoe's rotary press has made the 
cheap newspaper possible, and cultivated the minds 
of millions. 



COLLEGIATE INSTITUTIONS. 



37 



fostered by liberal donations from English 
Dissenters. In its earlier history it had been 
unlucky in its principals : one had proved 
to be a Jesuit, another a Baptist. 1 To 
preside over Harvard was a favorite aim 
of Cotton Mather that was never gratified. 
Many of the eminent men of the colony had 
been cultivated in its careful course of study. 
Samuel and John Adams were its graduates, 
aud it had long been the school of Massa- 
chusetts and of Boston. Classical learning 
still formed the foundation of all mental 
training, and no one was thought capable 
of professional excellence who was not learn- 
ed in the languages of Greece and Rome. 
Yet it is worthy of notice that Washington 
had never construed a line of Virgil, and 
was wholly self-educated, and that Franklin 
learned his pure style and strong passion 
for letters and science in the composing- 
room. 

Dartmouth College had been recently 
founded to teach the Indians, which it fail- 
ed to do. Yale was more flourishing. Co- 
lumbia College, in New York, founded in 
1756, had but two professors and twenty-five 
students ; but among them were to be num- 
bered John Jay and Alexander Hamilton. 
In New Jersey Princeton College, under the 
presidency of Dr. Witherspoon, a cultivated 
Scotchman, flourished, though with a poor 
endowment ; 2 it had sixty students and fine 
buildings. In Virginia William and Mary's 
College had been founded with an ample 
liberality by the two sovereigns whose 
names it bore ; it was endowed with a large 
income, and was designed to make Virginia 
a scene of wide intelligence. But the region 
of slavery could not be made favorable to 
mental progress. The college languished ; 3 
its students were few ; it is chiefly memora- 
ble as having furnished Jefferson with some 
facilities for study. 

In all the American colleges it is doubtful 
if three hundred students were educated an- 
nually. More scholars are now gathered at 
a single university than in the year 1775 
were found in all the famous seats of learn- 
ing of the country. Yet the colleges, how- 



* Winthrop. 

3 Burnaby, Pinkert, xiii. 733. Princeton College 
had only " two professors besides the provost." 
' 3 Ramsay, i. 263, notices its decay. Burnaby, Pin- 
kert., xiii. p. 714. 



ever imperfect, were still of real value to the 
people. They spread an acquaintance with 
the chief masters in science and letters, and 
helped to supply the press with literature, 
aud diffuse knowledge. Yet of the earlier 
American authors who attained fame, the 
chief had never passed through a regular 
course of study. Irving had gathered the 
charms of his perfect style from nature and 
practice in the newspapers. Cooper, Hal- 
leck, Drake, were self-educated and refined. 
Pure literature, in fact, is seldom taught in 
colleges, which have usually been little more 
than professional schools. The chief aim 
of education must always be to excite in- 
quiry and awaken the slumbering faculties. 
A just conception of its purpose our ances- 
tors had formed. They saw that there should 
be no limit to the spread of knowledge, and 
hoped that a system of instruction would 
grow up among the people that would 
prove a lasting bond of union. Their extrav- 
agant vision has been in part fulfilled. The 
common-school system has flowed from the 
germs which the Puritans, Huguenots, and 
Dutch planted in the wilderness, and the 
college is gradually assuming a more popu- 
lar character. 1 In the period of the Revo- 
lution, with one or perhaps two exceptions, 
the colleges were firmly on the side of prog- 
ress. Harvard gave its brightest geniuses 
to the cause of freedom, its transatlantic 
Hampden to fall at Bunker Hill, its Adams 
to found a nation. Yale was rigidly patri- 
otic. Princeton College, under Witherspoon, 
formed a bulwark of independence. Yet 
the influence of the colleges was only a faint 
impulse compared to that of the general in- 
telligence of our educated people, and that 
strong passion for liberty which had grown 
up from the simpler school-house and the 
modest library. 

Books, which had discovered America and 
first disturbed the wilderness, were not want- 
ing to our ancestors. The booksellers sold 
freely the new works of Johnson, Burke, or 
the famous Dr. Goldsmith, and one Boston 
house numbered ten thousand volumes on 



1 In cities, it is said, colleges seldom flourish, yet 
the eagerness with which students avail themselves 
of the advantages of the Boston Latin School or the 
New York Free College, a school of mines or a pop- 
ular law school, shows that utility must be one trait 
of the collegre course. 



38 



INTRODUCTION.— COLONIAL PROGRESS. 



its shelves. Several public and private 
libraries already existed. Kalin mentions 
the collection of excellent works, chiefly En- 
glish, in the public library founded by Frank- 
lin in 1742 at Philadelphia. The wealthier 
people of the town paid forty shillings cur- 
rency in the beginning, besides ten shillings 
annually. Several smaller libraries were 
also fouuded near it. Boston showed a 
" more general turn for music, painting, and 
the fine arts" than either of the more south- 
ern towns. 1 But literature still hesitated 
to flourish in the New World. Mather, 
Edwards, sermons, pamphlets, newspapers, 
were the chief sources of the mental prog- 
ress of our ancestors. It was idle to look 
for a Homer or Shakspeare in so wild a 
land ; 2 nor is it likely that a fourth epic will 
be sung for many a cycle. But reading was 
a characteristic trait of the whole people, 
and curiosity and inquiry the chief impulses 
of their civilization. In military affairs the 
colonists had shown courage and capacity. 
New England troops had grown famous at 
the conquest of Louisbourg, the siege of Ha- 
vana, and the fall of Quebec. While the En- 
glish ministry were denouncing them as a 
feeble, abject race, more intelligent observ- 
ers in England knew that the colonists were 
only cowards in cruel and inhuman deeds. 
Virginia's troops had fought bravely in the 
wilderness, and Washington was the most 
renowned of the colonial commanders. In 
military stores, guns, powder, arms, the 
country was deficient ; nor did its people 
suppose that they would ever be drawn 
into another great war. 

Around the thin line of settlements occu- 
pied by our ancestors a circle of various and 
almost hostile races hemmed in their prog- 



1 Burnaby, Pinkert., xiii. 747. 

2 Ramsay, i. 275. Its earliest poems were in Latin. 



ress. Between the austere and Puritanic 
New Englander and the loose, profligate, 1 
yet often courageous clergy and people of 
Quebec there could be no friendship. Can- 
ada refused to join in the cause of independ- 
ence. Its French population turned with 
aversion from an alliance with heretics and 
Saxons. To the westward the Canadian and 
clerical influence governed all the Indian 
tribes. The Mississippi was held by the 
Spaniards and by a few English planters 
who steadfastly refused to join the colo- 
nists. 2 New Orleans, recently transferred 
to Spain, was at first unwilling to sell arms 
and powder to the boats that had sailed 
down the great river from Pittsburg. The 
English in West Florida were hostile to the 
colonies ; Spanish Florida was still unde- 
cided. It was with no confidence in any 
exterior aid that the colonists looked out 
upon their beleaguered territory in the hot 
days of July, 1776. On every side around 
them they saw the impending horrors of a 
war of extirpation. Canada teemed with 
military preparations ; the savages were 
aroused through all the wilderness ; the cit- 
ies on the coast were threatened with sud- 
den ruin ; Howe was already landing on 
Staten Island; disunion tore the ranks of 
the reformers. Yet on the 2d of July, 1776, 
a bell rang cheerfully over Philadelphia that 
spoke the liberation of America. Samuel 
Adams had won his cause. 3 The 2d of July 
seemed to John Adams the grandest day of 
all the ages. 

1 Riedesel, Mem., iii. p. 87. Macgregor, Progress of 
Commerce, i. 141, notices the immorality of the Cana- 
dians. One minister of state stole £400,000. 

2 Gayarre, Louisiana, Spanish Dominion, p. 109. Fi- 
nally the Spaniards attack the English. 

3 Samuel Adams, to his disciple and kinsman John, 
was the " wedge of steel" that split the bond between 
England and America. J. Adams to William Tudor, 
June 5, 1817. So Jefferson looked to Samuel Adams 
as his guide and teacher. 



II. 

MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 




UNITED STATES PATENT-OFFICE, WASHINGTON, D. O. 



IT is no common century. Compared 
with its predecessors, it appears rather 
as a contrast than a development. It is not 
easy to state its relation to the past in terms 
of progression, since it may be said to have 
leaped into existence, and an adequate state- 
ment describes radical changes rather than 
evolution. 

The search for the " lost arts" is an agree- 
able literary and scientific ramble, with 
nooks containing treasures which well re- 
ward the explorer ; but one's eyes must be 
sadly out of focus if the distant, laborious 
ingenuities of remote ages are more distinct 
in the field of vision than the majestic works 
of the present. A locomotive is a more preg- 
nant fact than a pyramid or a sculptured 
cavern. The subject is one to which it is 
not possible to do full justice, even in a vol- 
ume, either by a general sketch or by par- 
ticular instances. We purpose to take a 
rapid preliminary survey of the field of me- 
chanical activity, and then to devote tne 
principal portion of our space to details re- 
specting a few prominent subjects, thereby 
enabling the reader to form a judgment from 
the sum of the parts, instead of a superficial 
estimate from a cursory glance at the mul- 
titudinous whole. 

The inquiry, whether it proceed by a gen- 
eral survey or by investigation of detached 
portions, will reveal the following facts : 

1. No nation has had exclusive concern in 
the production of any one class of inven- 



tions, and yet we need not go beyond the 
area of the English-speaking nations to 
make a thorough exhibit of the mechanical 
progress of the period under review. 

2. Nations allied by ties of blood and simi- 
larities of tone, temper, taste, and opportu- 
nity develop in parallel lines which continu- 
ally inosculate. This is well illustrated in 
the tools and methods of the machine-shop. 
England and America are rich in coal and 
iron, have the same incentives to industry, 
and the machines of each are largely the 
growth of successive improvements from the 
respective nations, in each of which a host 
of inventors are laboring at the solution of 
the same problems. 1 

3. Peculiar conditions of peoples, even of 
the same race, elicit distinct varieties of 
tools and methods. This diversity is exem- 
plified in the appliances used in America for 
subduing the wilderness and cultivating 
lately cleared land, as compared with the 
husbandry implements of Britain. 

Our people in the colonial period were 
generally engaged in husbandry, lumbering, 
trading, hunting, and fishing. The exports 
were grain, meat, naval stores, tobacco, and 
pelts. But few mechanic arts were carried on 
systematically, except ship-building. Car- 

i It is onr purpose in this series to treat of American 
progress in the various fields of activity. But in this 
field of Mechanical Progress, as in some others, it is 
plainly impossible to exclude what has been accom- 
plished by other nations.— Ed. 



40 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



pentry, blacksmithing, and tanning were 
regular trades. In the cities other indus- 
tries engaged attention, but in the country 
the clothes, hats, and shoes of the people 
and the harness of the horses were made by 
the people at their houses in the winter or 
in seasons of inclement weather. 

There were some other industries in a few 
favored localities — some paper mills in Mas- 
sachusetts and Pennsylvania, some cloth 
mills at Boston and Germantown, Pennsyl- 
vania. Beaver hats were made in a few 
places ; linen, at a settlement near Boston ; 
glass was manufactured in Massachusetts 
and New Hampshire ; the hand card, the 
spinning-wheel, and the loom constituted 
almost always a part of the furnishing of 
country houses. 

The roads were bad, the equipages clum- 
sy, as they were, indeed, in England at that 
time. Twenty -four gentlemen's carriages 
were owned in Philadelphia in 1761. Coun- 
try squires and patricians rode in their 
coaches and four, or even six, when the jour- 
ney was long or the season unpropitious. 
Postilions and outriders were the acme of 
style. Judge Reed, of Pennsylvania, import- 
ed a skillful "whip" for his four-in-hand. 
The country wagons and the agricultural im- 
plements were rude and ineffective. Carts, 
plows, and hoes were made by the country 
mechanic of such material as he could pro- 
cure, little metal being used in either. 
Strips of iron made by hammering out old 
horseshoes were the facings of the wooden 
mould-boards of plows. The laws of England 
had rigorously maintained the dependence 
of the provinces, forbidding all important 
works in iron, and the war found the people 
unprepared to supply their sudden needs. 
The war was to a large degree fought by 
men in homespun and hunting shirts, armed 
with the frontiers-man's trusty rifle. 

When peace rendered possible commercial 
and mechanical enterprise, a new era dawn- 
ed. Many things which the colonists had 
cheerfully imported from the mother coun- 
try began to be made at home, and many 
industries which had been repressed by law 
to keep the colonies subordinate and de- 
pendent began to be developed. In 1787 
the first cotton mill in America was built at 
Beverly, Massachusetts. In 1789 Samuel 
Slater introduced the Arkwright system of 



mill spinning. The exportation of machin- 
ery from England was successfully prevent- 
ed, and Slater was obliged to make the card- 
ing, drawing, roving, and spinning mechan- 
ism from memory. In 1783 Oliver Evans 
had introduced his improvements in grain 
mills, and a few years afterward his steam- 
engine — the first double-acting high-press- 
ure steam-engine on record. In 1785 Rum- 
sey, and in 1788 Fitch, had their boats on 
the Potomac and Delaware respectively. In 
1787 Jacob Perkins had his nail-cutting ma- 
chines and dies for coin. In 1794 Whitney's 
cotton-gin, and in 1797 Whittemore's card- 
sticking machine, came to the help of the 
cotton interest. Other inventions followed 
in rapid succession. 

The progress above noted occurred within 
fifteen years after the treaty of peace. It 
is doubtful whether on the 4th of July, 1776, 
there were more than two steam-engines in 
the thirteen colonies, one at Passaic, New 
Jersey, the other in Philadelphia. The New- 
comen engine was as yet only partially sup- 
planted by the Watt, and offered but mod- 
erate inducements for any purpose except 
pumping water from copper and lead mines, 
whose rich ores paid for the wasteful use of 
wood or coal. 

The great advance in machinery, and es- 
pecially our own active part in it, is very re- 
cent. Persons yet alive remember the first 
crossing of the Atlantic by a steamboat, the 
Savannah. Those yet in the prime of life 
recollect the opening of the first railway 
to passenger traffic. Horatio Allen drove 
the first locomotive which was imported. 
Thus the century under consideration, from 
a mechanical point of view, is most readily 
segregated from its predecessors. It is not 
saying too much to assert that at its com- 
mencement the coal of England was scarce- 
ly valued except for household uses. As to 
the coal of America, its extent and its util- 
ity were not even suspected. Machinery as 
yet was not. The steam-engine of New- 
comen was pumping in some few mines in 
England. This engine condensed its steam 
in the cylinder beneath the piston, cooling 
the cylinder at each stroke, and using the 
condensation of the steam as a means of 
producing a partial vacuum, in order to ob- 
tain the value of the atmospheric pressure 
above the piston. The duty or valuable ef- 



STEAM-ENGINES OF NEWCOMEN AND WATT. 



11 




NEWOOMEN'S STEAM-ENGINE. 

feet of the NeAvcomeu engine in 1769 was 
5,500,000 pounds of water raised one foot 
high by one bushel of Welsh coal. Watt's 
inventions were made between the years 
1769 and 1784, and before the year 1800 the 
duty of the Cornish engine was quadrupled ; 
by 1840 it was again quadrupled. Watt add- 
ed to the steam-engine the separate condenser 
and the air-pump. By the former he avoided 
the cooling of the cylinder before each ef- 
fective stroke of the piston ; by the latter 
he made the vacuum more perfect. He sub- 
sequently made the additions of the parallel 
motion, of the steam-jacket to the 
cylinder, and of the cylinder cover, 
and made the steam act positively 
against the piston, instead of mere- 
ly using it to produce a vacuum. 
Afterward he made the engine dou- 
ble acting, that is, used pressure of 
steam on the sides of the piston 
alternately ; then he increased the 
strength of the parts, the rapidity 
of the stroke, and the pressure of 
the steam. Coal, the black slave, 
had been chained below from time 
immemorial, and Watt contrived a 
way of setting him to work. Up to 
this period there had been scarcely 
any progress ; after it hosts of in- 
ventions crowd upon the scene and 
clamor for notice. The Watt pe- 
riod inaugurates the century whose 
progress in the mechanic arts is 
under consideration. 

The utilization of coal in the 
production of steam for driving 
machinery is the turning-point in 
the history of mechanical develop- 
ment, and made possible improve- 
ments in various other directions. 



If there had been no Watt, Smeaton, Ark- 
wright, Hargreaves, Cartwright, Cort, Mur- 
doch, Whitney, Trevethick, and Stephen- 
son, the victory of Colonel Clive at Plassey 
might not have proved the precursor of the 
occupation of the whole of Hindostan. But 
for the machinery which by gradual accre- 
tions gave to England an increased power 
of production more than equivalent to the 
addition of a population equal to that of 
China to her industrial forces, the farther 
works of Clive, the victories of Hastings, 
Comwallis, Wellesley, Napier, Hardinge, and 
Gough, would not have occurred, and in 
their places would have been mere raids or 
desultory expeditions, half commercial and 
half military, after the first burst of con- 
quest and spoliation. 

This accession of labor was in a shape 
more tense and patient than even the en- 
during Chinaman, for its muscles were of 
iron, its food could be dug from the earth, 
and when at last worn out, it could be 
worked over again, and had not to be boxed, 
labeled, and sent back to be deposited near 
the tablets of its ancestors. 




watt's double-acting steam-engine, 1769. 



42 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



The capacity of the steam-engines of En- 
gland may be otherwise stated. It is esti- 
mated that the great Pyramid of Ghizeh oc- 
cupied the labor of 100,000 men for twenty 
years in the erection alone. The steam- 
engines of England, worked by 36,000 men, 
would raise the same quantity of material 
to the same height in eighteen hours. Thus 
reckoning ten hours to the day, and three 
bundled working days to the year, three 
thousand pyramids might be erected by the 
steam-power of England in the period occu- 
pied by the builders of that of Ghizeh. 

The multiplication, in the course of years, 
by flftyfold of the working power of En- 
gland caused such an enormous increase of 
material that privy councils, armies, and 
fleets vied with each other in explorations 
by sea and land. The Northwest Passage, 
which has a literature and a history of its 
own — a history exultant and yet sad — only 
meant a short road to India around one end 
of that terribly long continent which barred 
Europe from sailing westward to Asia. 

There is no more truthful accessible test 
of the comparative ingenuity of periods in a 
given country than the number of patents 
granted therein. Our national patent sys- 
tem has been in operation only since 1790, 
but that of England is much older. The 
following table gives the numbers of patents 
granted in decades for the two centuries. 

Previous to 1790 patents were granted by 
individual States, as to Fulton, Fitch, Rum- 
sey, Evans, and others. 



Decade 

ending 


England. 


Decade 
ending 


England. 


United States. 


1680 


49 


1780 


297 




1690 


55 


1790 


512 




1T00 


101 


1S00 


675 


' 306 


1710 


20 


1810 


936 


1,086 


1T20 


45 


1820 


1,125 


1,748 


1730 


94 


1830 


1,533 


2,986 


1740 


48 


1840 


2,710 


5,488 


1750 


85 


1850 


4,666 


5,942 


1760 


99 


1860 


25,201 


23,140 


1770 


221 


1870 


35,079 


79,612 



The factory system is the growth of the 
century now closing. When Richard Ark- 
wright was traveling over the hills of Lan- 
cashire, buying the tresses of the country 
lasses to make wigs, and Hargreaves was 
working at the rudimentary carding -ma- 
chine, the artisans of the country worked 
each in his little shop. The wool-stapler 
dealt out his lots of wool to the carders and 
spinners, who took it home and returned the 
agreed-upon quality and weight of yarn ; to 



another set of workmen the yarn was ap- 
portioned for weaving; other tradesmen 
finished the work. The same practice pre- 
vailed with the hardware makers and iron- 
mongers; the nailers of Wolverhampton, the 
artificers of Birmingham, the cutlers of 
Sheffield, the carpet-weavers of Axminster — 
each received at his house a quota of mate- 
rial such as he or his family could make up 
in a few days, and returned the finished work 
to his employer. It is easy to imagine how 
this may have been managed, for it is only 
within a comparatively few years that the 
business of boot and shoe making has been 
aggregated into factories and performed by 
machinery. 

In the factory the labor-saving machines 
which have superseded the laborious baud 
operations are employed in great numbers 
with comparatively few attendants. The 
steam-engine, fed by coal and water, or the 
water-wheel, provides the power required, 
and the duty of the attendant is to supply 
the constantly recurring need for fresh ma- 
terials, to mend breaks, or repair faults. In- 
stead of being a mere fashioner of a piece at 
a time, the workman becomes a supervisor 
of nearly automatic machinery, whose appe- 
tite for material he is required to anticipate 
and satisfy, and whose occasional eccentrici- 
ties it is his duty to correct. 

The development of the cotton manufac- 
ture furnishes the best and perhaps earliest 
example of the factory system. Arkwright 
appears to have worked at his cotton ma- 
chinery for several years, and in company 
with several partners, who successively fur- 
nished means and then tired of the project, 
before he erected the mill at Nottingham, 
which was worked by horse-power. This 
mill was erected in 1770 ; another one was 
established in 1771, in which the machinery 
was driven by a water-wheel. So new was 
the idea of employing other than hand or 
foot labor that his spinning-machine was 
long known as the " water-frame," and the 
product as the "water-twist." His other 
improvements were patented in 1775, and 
thus the century starts with Mr. Arkwright 
fresh upon the track, leading in a race the 
success of which has changed the aspect of 
our commercial and social systems. 

Arkwright, in spite of fraudulent tres- 
passers and expensive lawsuits, lived to see 



THE HOE AND THE PLOW. 



43 



the perfect triumph of his ingenuity and 
sedulous care. His suits developed the con- 
ditions and situations which taxed the wis- 
dom of the judges, and elicited the decisions 
and maxims that have given shape to the 
patent system of England and the United 
States. Arkwright v. Nightingale, the King 
v. Arkwright, are cases that form the " hard 
pan" of the Patent Law. 

We shall see how well the facts of the 
various branches of invention arrange them- 
selves within the period we are considering 
— how the rank and file of inventions array 
themselves in battalions, brigades, divis- 
ions, on one side of the bine chronological. 
Turn we to steam in its original form as a 
pumping engine, or to its subsequent duties 
as a transporting agent on water or on the 
land, or as a driver of machinery ; or look 
we abroad to other lines of enterprise and 
industry — the manufacture of cotton and 
wool, the production and manufacture of 
iron, wood-working machinery, hydraulic 
engineering, the manufacture and applica- 
tions of gas, electricity in its various forms 
and applications, the construction of instru- 
ments of measurement and precision, do- 
mestic machinery — we find that each group 
forms in regimental order within the bounds 
we have indicated. 

This, though unexampled, was not fortu- 
itous ; the time was ripe. Yet there was 
but slight indication beforehand of the new 
departure. It was as if by a mysterious im- 
pulse all started at once, the utilization of 
the buried stores of coal by means of the 
Watt engine being the great fact of the 
new dispensation. 

The field is too great to give even a brief 
account of each division, and a few must 
be selected as 
examples from 
which the gener- 
al progress may 
be deduced. 

AGRICULTURAL 
IMPLEMENTS. 

There is no 
apology needed 
for beginning 
our review with 
farming imple- 
ments. Howev- 



er disinclined a citizen may be to blister his 
hands by chopping fire-wood or mauling 
rails, he freely admits the respectability of 
the employment and its ancient fame. Ad- 
mitting, then, the precedence of the hus- 
bandman, we will first look at the principal 
agricultural tool — the plow. 

This tool has never outgrown its resem- 
blance to the forked limb which was first 
used as a hoe and then as a plow. With 
such tools as they could muster, men shaped 
the tough limbs and crotches of trees 
iuto implements. The forked piece (A) was 
trimmed and became the hoe (B), a thong 
binding the handle and blade portions to 
prevent their splitting apart. We give pic- 
tures (C) of two ancient Egyptian hoes now 
in the Berlin Museum. A similar one may 
be seen in the Abbott Museum, New York. 
Two suitable sticks (D) were notched and 
lashed together. Two other resources of a 
people destitute of metal are shown (E, F), 
one, of the South Sea Islanders, the blade 
made of a scapula, the other made of a wal- 
rus tooth on a handle. It is shown (G, H, I) 
how men made plows from similar mate- 
rials ; one limb formed the share, the other 
the beam ; or (as in I) one the beam and 
the other the handle and sole, with a point 
which forms the share. 

The actual change in the plow for more 
than thirty centuries has been but local. 
The greater part of the world uses a plow 
much like those pictured on the palaces of 
Thebes. Those used in our colonial period 
were a very slight departure from that pat- 
tern. The plow was of wood ; it was formed 
of pieces whose shape adapted them to be- 
come parts of the structure. The beam, 
standard, and handles — if the plow had two, 




THE OBIGIN OP T1IE UOE AND THE PLOW. 



44 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 




BTJDE MODERN PLOWS. 

A, an East Indian plow. B, a modern Egyptian plow. 
C, a Mexican plow. D, a Chinese plow. E, an ancient 
British implement, which yet survives in the western 
wilds of Scotland. The latter is pointed with iron, 
and may have been the origin of the bull-tongue plow, 
more familiar to men of '76 than to the farmer of the 
present day. 

which was not always the case — were of 
seasoned stuff; the mould-board was a block 
of wood which had a winding grain approx- 
imatiug the curve required. 

The accompanying figures show a num- 
ber of plows yet used in some foreign coun- 
tries. These differ in no essential respect 
from plows shown on the tombs of Egypt, the 
vases of Etruria, the bass-reliefs of Greece, 
and the medals of 
Rome. The plows of 
the south of France, 
of Spain, of Calabria, 
Greece, Turkey, and 
Syria are very simi- 
lar. 

The plow of the 
past is now utterly 



abandoned by us, and we have a new tool of 
a different material, still, however, preserv- 
ing the peculiar family feature ; it will never 
get over the resemblance to that primordial 
limb. 

The plow of 1776 was all of wood except 
the wrought iron share and some bolts and 
nuts whereby the parts were fastened to- 
gether. The standard rose nearly vertical- 
ly, having attached to it the beam and the 
sole-piece. On the nose of the beam hting 
the clevis ; the mould-board and sbare were 
attached to a frame braced between the 
beam and the sole. The wooden mould- 
board was sometimes plated with sheet- 
iron or by strips made by hammering out 
old horseshoes. A clump of iron shaped 
like a half spear formed the point. It was 
known as a " bull plow," " bull-tongue," or 
" bar-share" plow. Two pins in the stand- 
ard formed the handles, and it required the 
strength of a man to manage it. The work 
was slowly and ill performed by cattle. 

The shovel plow, which until lately was 
the principal plow of the South, and is yet 
largely used in furrowing out ground for 
hoed crops, such as corn, cane, and potatoes, 
and in tending the same, is clearly a deriva- 
tive from the old crotched stick. 

The order of improvement is about as fol- 
lows : Some time in the last century a cer- 
tain plow was imported into England, prob- 
ably from Flanders, which had been long 
far in advance of England in gardening and 
horticulture. Queen Elizabeth used to get 
salads from Flanders as a change from the 
interminable beef and beer. This imple- 
ment was known as the Rotherham plow; 
but whether the name was a corruption of 
Rotterdam no one knows. It was a very 
tidy implement in shape, but was all of 
wood, with the exception of a sheet -iron 
covering to the working parts. This re- 
quired frequent renewal. James Small, 
of Berwickshire, Scotland, introduced the 




AMERICAN PLOW OF 1776. 



MODERN PLOWS. 



45 



plow (a) with a cast iron mould-board and a 
wrought iron share. His was the first cast 
iron plow. He made the shares also of cast 
iron in 1785. 

Thomas Jefferson from 1788 to 1793 stud- 
ied and experimented to determine the prop- 
er shape of the mould-board to do the work 
effectively and offer the least resistance, 
treating it as consisting of a lifting wedge 
and an upsetting wedge, with an easy con- 
necting curve. 

Newbold, of Burlington, New Jersey, in 
1797 patented a plow with a mould-board, 
share, and land-side all cast together. 

Peacock in his patent of 1807 cast his 
plow in three pieces, the point of the colter 
entering a notch in the breast of the sbare. 

Ransome, of Ipswich, England, in 1803 
chilled the cast shares on the under side, so 
that they might keep sharp by wear. 

Jetbro Wood, of Scipio, Cayuga County, 
New York, patented improvements in 1819. 
He made the best and most popular plow (b) 
of its day, and was entitled to much credit 
for skill and enterprise, but lost his fortune 
in developing his invention and defending 
his rights. He, however, overestimated the 
extent of novelty in his invention. He 
seems to have thought it the first iron plow. 
Its peculiar merit consisted in the mode of 
securing the cast iron portions together by 
lugs and locking pieces, doing away with 
screw-bolts and much weight, complexity, 
and expense. Wood did more than any oth- 
er person to drive out of use tbe cumbrous 
contrivances common throughout the coun- 
try, giving a lighter, cheaper, and more ef- 
fective implement. It was the first plow in 
which the parts most exposed to wear could 









C^V 



HOWARD WUEEL-PLOW. 



plows: 1785-1874. 
a, Small's, b, Wood's, c, Gibbs's. 

be renewed in the field by the substitution 
of cast pieces. 

In 1820 Timothy Pickering, of Salem, 
Massachusetts, first recognized the impor- 
tance of straight transverse lines on the 
mould-board. The shape was such that it 
might be cut from a conical frustum. 

In 1854 the Gibbs plow (c) had its straight 
transverse lines horizontal, the surface from 
which it might be cut being a cylinder with 
its axis horizontal. 

The Howard plow shows the favorite style 
of plow in England. The long stilts give 
great power to the plowman. The wheels 
determine tbe depth accurately, except in 
short and sudden rises and hollows. 

It is impossible here to describe the mi- 
nor improvements of this implement, great 
as is the sum of their importance — the roll- 
ing colter, the wheel which takes the place 
of the sliding sole, adaptations for setting 
the plow for depth and 
for land, to prevent 
clogging, etc. 

Aaron Smith, of En- 
gland, first made that 
form of double plow 
which has a small 
advance share and 
mould-board to turn 
over the sod, followed 
by the usual share and 
mould-board to invert 
the furrow-slice, and 
thus completely bury 
the surface soil. It is 



_^[ji^l5s@ES!3E21 
&^^<n' am 



4G 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 




fowlee's steam-plow. 



now much used in England, and is especial- 
ly made by Ransome. In the West it is 
called the double Michigan plow. 

Substitutes for the plow are found in 
spading machines, which aim to do the work 
more in the order of hand spading, which 
is confessedly better than plowing. They 
are not likely to supersede plows. Other 
forms of substitutes are the various cultiva- 
tors, known by the local names of grubbers, 
scarifiers, horse-hoes, etc., their action being 
to drag teeth or small shares through the 
ground to loosen and aerate it, giving it a 
tilth suitable for sowing or planting. They 
are also used for stirring the ground in 
the balks between rows of growing plants, 
known as hoed crops, such as corn, cane, or 
potatoes, but the more a man sticks to his 
cultivator, and the less he bothers with 
the hoe, the better will be the result, if the 
amount of the planting be large. 

The steam-plow has proved a success un- 
der favorable circumstances. Few are at 
work in the United States ; many hundreds 
in England. A large number were sent to 
Egypt, where the Khedive is determined to 
be a second Pharaoh on the old order an- 
nounced by Joseph, who bought the per- 
sonal property, then the land, then the peo- 
ple, and then rented the land to them for a 
fifth of the produce — the same share as 
Solomon received for his vineyard. 

Steam-plows are constructed on several 
principles : 

1. A traction engine dragging plows : this 
is not a success as yet. 

2. A pair of engines on trucks on the sides 
of the field, and dragging gangs of plows 



back and forth, the engines moving a piece 
ahead between each pull. The cut shows a 
modified form with a single engine, endless 
rope, and a traveling truck on the opposite 
side of the field to carry the pulley over 
which the rope runs and returns. 

3. A single engine, and ropes so arranged 
around the field on bearers, known as por- 
ters, as to drag the plow -gang in any re- 
quired direction by suitably changing the 
position of the porters which determine the 
direction of motion of the rope. 

The improvements in seeding machines 
and grain drills have effected a saving of 
seed, more careful planting or sowing, and 
greater economy in labor. 

One hunched years ago our fathers toiled 
in the harvest field with the sickle. In 
Flanders they had a kind of cradle known 
as the Hainault scythe, but it was unknown 
to English-speaking peoples. The bent 
back, the gathering left arm, and the sweep- 
ing sickle painfully reaped the bunches of 
grain, which were thrown into heaps large 
enough to form gavels for binding. The 
cradle was a great improvement upon the 
sickle, the long and deep-reaching blade 
of the grain scythe, aided by the fingers of 
the cradle, making a progress in the harvest 
field which left the sickle and reapiug-hook 
far in the rear. 

The American War of Independence was 
not long over before attempts were made to 
construct machines which would bring into 
use horse labor as a substitute for the severe 
hand-work. 

The reaping machine has attained its 
present degree of completeness after seven- 



EARLY REAPING MACHINES. 



47 



ty-five years of persistent effort. General 
attention had been but little directed to the 
subject until the year 1851, when at the 
World's Fair in London the American ma- 
chines created much excitement, and caused 
the forgotten experiments of half a century 
to be withdrawn from their limboes and ex- 
hibited to cool the enthusiasm of " those for- 
eigners." Experiments in reaping machines 
had been pursued to a much greater extent 
in Britain than in the United States until 
within a then comparatively recent period ; 
but the essential features which secured 
success were American. 

The first reaping machine on record is 
that described by Pliny about a.d. 60, and 
by Palladius some centuries later. It is 
stated by these authors to have been used 
in Gaul ; the former writer says in the ex- 
tensive plains in that part known as Rhse- 
tia. It consisted of a cart pushed by an ox, 
and having a comb-like bar in front which 
stripped off the ears of the wheat and al- 
lowed them to fall into the box, while the 
straw remained on the ground. It was 
used in level places, and where the straw 
was not wanted for winter fodder. The 
implement has been re-invented after the 
lapse of fourteen centuries, and is now 
used as a " header" for gathering clover 
seed. 

After this Gallic implement there is a long 
gap, and the first machine, or rather sug- 
gestion, of the moderns is that of Pitt, in 
1786, which had a cylinder with rows of 
combs or " ripples," which tore oft" the ears 



and discharged them into the box of the 
machine. 

It is a part of our purpose to show the cu- 
mulative character of invention, and also to 
illustrate the fact that nearly the whole aim 
seems to be fixed in a particular direction 
for a long course of years ; then the germ of 
the eventual success enters unexpectedly, 
and remains unnoticed for a period, after 
which the interest is transferred to the pre- 
viously overlooked type, which in its imma- 
ture form gave little prospect of success. 

For about twoscore years attention was 
principally directed to revolving cutters or 
systems of revolving blades. The motion 
of the cutting apparatus being derived from 
the rotary motion of the wheels supporting 
the implement, it naturally occurred to con- 
nect the axle or wheels with a rotary cutter, 
and later with an oscillating one, which had 
its analogues in the swing of the scythe and 
the reach of the sickle. The first recipro- 
cating knife was in 1822. 

As to the mode of attaching the horses, it 
was almost universally deemed necessary to 
hitch them behind the implement, which 
they pushed before them. Up to 1823 but 
four inventors hitched the team in front of 
the implement. As soon as this idea did 
occur to inventors, they made the horse walk 
alongside the swath cut by the knives, con- 
stituting what is known as the side cut. 

In 1806 Gladstone, of England, patented 
his front-draft side-cut revolving-knife ma- 
chine. A segment bar with fingers gathered 
the grain and held the straw while the knifo 




KUAP1NQ IN GAUL, FIB8T TO FOURTU OENTUKY A.D. 



48 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 




Gladstone's reaping machine, England, 1806, 



cut it, the fingers having the function of 
shear blades. The forward draft was also 
adopted by Mann in 1820, and by Ogle, of 
England, in 1822, who shows the first recip- 
rocating knife bar. It is the type of the suc- 
cessful machines, but was constructed so 
poorly that its merits never became appar- 
ent. It was drawn by horses in advance; 
the cutter bar projected at the side, and it 
had a reel to gather the grain to the cutter. 
The machine had a grain platform, which 
was tilted to drop the gavel. This was the 
first dropper. In 1826 Bell made a working 
machine. It was pushed before the horse ; 
the grain was cut by knives vibrating on 
pivots. It had a grain reel ; the grain fell 
upon an inclined traveling apron, which car- 
ried it off and delivered it at the side. 

In 1828 Samuel Lane, of Maine, combined 
the reaper and the thresher. 

In 1833 Hussey, of Maryland, made the first 
valuable harvester. It had open fingers, 
with the knife reciprocating in the space. 
The open-topped slotted finger was patented 
by Hussey in 1847. The cutter bar was on 
a hinged frame. 

In 1834 M'Cormick, of Virginia, patented 
his reaper, which, with various improve- 
ments in 1845 and 1847, received a Council 
medal at the London 
World's Fair in 1851. f^^^Hs^lSaiiijr "' 
This machine hail a ./V-" 

sickle -ed^cd sectional \ V|/, ^C ~":'- 

knil'r reciprocated l»\ 
crank and pitman by 
gear connection to the 4^=%- '~*8$ 

drive -wheel on which . ;' .- v -' 

the frame rested ; spear- 
shaped fingers gathered 



the grain, which was laid over 
to the cutter by a revolving 
reel. A divider was used on 
each end of the platform. The 
driver and raker had seats on 
the machine. 

In 1849 Haines, of Illinois, 
suspended the frame carrying 
the conveyer, reel, and cutter 
to the axles of the bearing- 
wheels, and hinged the frame 
to the tongue, so that it was 
capable of turning upon its 
bearings by means of a lever to 
elevate and depress the cutter. 
Since 1851 nearly 3000 patents have been 
granted in the United States for harvesters 
and attachments therefor. 

In the summer of 1855, at a competitive 
trial of reapers, about forty miles from Paris, 
France, three machines were exhibited from 
America, England, and Algiers. The follow- 
ing was the result in a field of oats : the 
American machine cut an acre in twenty- 
two minutes ; the English machine cut an 
acre in sixty - six minutes ; the Algerian 
machine cut an acre in seventy-two min- 
utes. 

Some of the subsequent improvements 
may be enumerated as follows : The Sylla 
and Adams patent (1853), having a cutter 
bar hinged to a frame, which is in turn 
hinged to the main frame. This is the prin- 
cipal feature of the " Aultman and Miller," 
or " Buckeye," harvester. The combined 
rake andreel of the "Dorsey" machine (1856), 
sweeping in a general horizontal direction 
across the quadrantal platform. The " Hen- 
derson" rake, on what is known as the 
" Wood" machine (1860), having a chain be- 
low the platform, which carries the rake in 
a curved path. The Sieberling "dropper" 
(1861), which is a slatted platform vibrating 
to discharge the gavel. The Whiteley pat- 



MM 




BELL'S HEAPING MACHINE, ENGLAND, 1826. 



REAPERS AND THRESHERS. 



49 




THE AMEKIOAN SELF-RAKING REAPING MACHINE (" CHAMPION'' PATTERN). 



ents, which constitute the " Champion" ma- 
chine of Springfield, Ohio. 

The threshing machine first saw the light 
in 1786. It was invented by Andrew Meikle, 
of Tyninghain, East Lothian, Scotland. It 
is true that attempts had been made by 
Menzies in 1732 and Stirling in 1758, but 
they proceeded on a wrong principle, and 
were abandoned. Menzies's had a series of 
revolving flails, and Stirling's had a cylinder 
with arms upon a vertical shaft l'unning at 
high velocity. Meikle invented the drum 




meikxe's threshing MACHINE, 1786— INTERIOR VIEW. 

with beaters acting upon the grain in the 
sheaf, which was fed between rollers. The 
English improvement was to make the beat- 
ing drum work in a concave known as the 
breasting, the grain and straw being scutch- 
ed and rubbed between the two and carried 
to the shaker, which removed the straw from 
the grain and chaff, a large amount of grain 
also falling through the bars of the concave. 
The American improvement upon this 
consists mainly — besides numerous details 
which secure speed, lightness, and effective- 
ness — in having upon the drum, spikes or 
4 



teeth which pass between fixed spikes on 
the concave ; the grain in the straw being 
subjected to a severe beating and rubbing 
action as it passes in a zigzag course be- 
tween the two, being carried by the teeth 
of the drum. The latter is now usually a 
skeleton cylinder of iron bars with sword- 
shaped spikes secured by threaded tangs 
and nuts. The front edges of the spikes 
are rounded and smooth to prevent break- 
ing of the grain ; the Bpikes of the concave 
have smooth edges presented toward the 
coming grain for a similar reason. The En- 
glish still adhere to the flat beaters, like 
narrow wings or slats, placed longitudi- 
nally, and with edges projecting outward- 
ly from the drum. The Americans adhere 
to the spiked cylinder. A fair trial be- 
tween the two was had on the farm of Mr. 
Mechi, Tiptree Hall, Kelvedon, England, in 
1853. The American machine was opera- 
ted by the two persons who had shipped it 
from the United States ; one of them was 
the present writer. The trial was conclu- 
sive. The American machine was driven by 
a portable engine of six horse-power, and 
■averaged sixty-four bushels of wheat per 




THE AMERICAN THIIE.^HINO MACHINE. 



50 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 




ENGLISH THRESHING MAOUrNE. 



hour ; 448 bushels of barley were threshed 
in six hours, nearly treble the work of the 
English competing machines, and the grain 
in much cleaner condition. 

The editor of the London Times, Mr. Mow- 
bray Morris, himself witnessed the opera- 
tion, and wrote as follows in an editorial of 
the following day, November 1, 1853 : 

" The machine, which is portable, weighs only four- 
teen hundred-weight, threshes easily, and without 
waste, at the rate of one bushel in forty seconds, and 
turns out the grain perfectly clean and ready for mar- 
ket. It is therefore about twice as light in draught as 
the lightest of our machines of the same description ; 
does as much if not more work than the best of them, 
and, with much less power, dresses the grain, which 
they do not, and can be profitably disposed of at less 

money than our implement -makers charge We 

build threshing-machines strong and dear enough and 
tremendously heavy either to work or to draw. The 
American farmer demands and gets a machine which 
does not ruin him to buy or his horse to pull about, 
which runs on coach and not wagon wheels, and which, 
without breaking the heart of the power that drives it, 
yields the largest and most satisfactory results. Noth- 
ing, therefore, can better illustrate the difference in 
mechanical genius in the two countries than this grain 
separator as compared with its British rivals." 

It may be mentioned that the apparent 
perversity with which the British retain flat 
beaters instead of the teeth is that in many 
parts of Britain there is a profitable market 
for trussed straw ; the straw is less broken 
by the beaters than by the teeth, is in more 
unbroken lengths, and trusses more readily 
and handsomely. 

The saving in the operations of husband- 



ry by the use of modern implements and 
methods is equal to one-half the former cost 
of working. By the improved plow, labor 
equivalent to that of one horse in three is 
saved. By means of drills two bushels of 
seed will go as far as three bushels scattered 
broadcast. The plants come up in rows, and 
may be tended by horse-hoes ; being in the 
bottoms of little furrows, the ground crum- 
bles down against the plant, which is not so 
readily heaved out by the winter's frost. The 
reaping machine is a saving of more than 
one-third the labor when it cuts and rakes, 
and will eventually save fully three-fourths 
when it is made to bind automatically, as it 
shortly will be. The threshing machine is 
a saving of two-thirds on the old hand-flail 
mode. The root-cutters for stock in En- 
gland, and in some places in the Northern 
States and Canada, much reduce the labor of 
winter feeding. The saving in the labor of 
handling hay in the field and barn by means 
of horse-rakes and horse hay-forks is equal 
to one -half. With the exception of the 
grain drill, which had a precarious exist- 
ence previous to 1776, all these improve- 
ments have been commenced and brought 
to the present relative perfection within the 
century now closing. 

THE STEAM-ENGINE AND ITS APPLICATIONS. 

We have no space for the repetition of 
the history of the steam-engine — to recite 



THE CORNISH PUMPING ENGINE. 



r.i 



the toys and experiments of Hero, Da Vinci, 
De Garay, Porta, the mythical De Caus, the 
water - raising apparatus, not engines, of 
Worcester and Savary, and the engine of 
Papin, in which steam was first used against 
a piston in a cylinder. 

Our century opens with the engine of 
Newcomen in action, as shown on page 41. 
This engine had a vertical open-topped cyl- 
inder ahove the hoiler. It had two valves, 
which were operated hy hand ; one admit- 
ted steam helow the piston, which was 
raised by the weight of the pump-rod. The 
steam having filled the space helow the pis- 
ton, was then shut oft', and the valve of the 
water-injection pipe was opened. The jet 
of water condensed the steam in the cylin- 
der, and produced a partial vacuum therein ; 
the weight of the atmosphere pressed down 
the piston, and raised the pump-rod. This 
was really quite excellent in its way, and 
the atmospheric engine is yet a very useful 
pumping engine. It was as great an ad- 



vance on Captain John Savary's water ele- 
vator as James Watt's subsequent improve- 
ment was upon itself. To recite its faults 
and inefficiencies — for it had both — is but 
to recite the inventions of Watt. 

Watt's first patent was taken out in 1769, 
in conjunction with a Mr. Roebuck, who aft- 
erward retired from the partnership, and 
Watt found an excellent successor to him 
in Matthew Boulton, of Soho, near Birming- 
ham. 

The fame of the steam-engine traveled to 
the English colonies even before the date 
of the invention of 
Watt, but, for such 
mills as the colo- 
nists erected, the 
water - powers on 
the streams were 
yet abundantly suf- 
ficient. It is doubt- 
ful whether there 
were more than 




SINGLE-ACTING OOBNI8U PUMPING ENGINE. 



52 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



two steam-engines in the colonies. They 
were both of the Newcomen kind. One 
was imported in 1736 for the Schnyler 
copper mines at Passaic, New Jersey ; the 
other was built in 1772 by Christopher 
Coles, of Philadelphia, for use in a distil- 
lery. 

The principal use, for a long time, of the 
steam-engine in England continued to be in 
pumps for draining mines and for supplying 
water to cities. London for this latter pur- 
pose had a Boulton and Watt engine in the 
vicinity of London Bridge. This type of 
engine has permanently received its name 
from the locality of its first triumphs, and 
is known as the Cornish. It is the largest, 
heaviest, most expensive, and most econom- 
ically driven engine known to the engineer 
— a valuable stationary engine when par- 
ties are capable of spending a large sum to 
secure a machine which may be run at a 
small outlay. It is a large investment of 
capital for the sake of an economic adminis- 
tration. The one shown in the illustration 
on the previous page is a single-acting 
Cornish engine. The cylinder is 100 inches 
in diameter ; working stroke, 11 feet ; the 
plunger is 50 inches in diameter, 11 feet 
stroke. When working full stroke it pumps 
150 gallons per second to a height of 140 
feet. 

The Louisville pumping engine is of this 
character. The new engines at Brooklyn 
and Cincinnati are direct, the pump being 
below the cylinder. Spring Garden, Phila- 
delphia, and Belleville, New Jersey, have 
the Cornish; Cambridge, Massachusetts, and 
Newark, New Jersey, the Worthington Du- 
plex. Of the 115,000,000 of gallons forming 
the daily supply of London, 79,000,000 gal- 
lons are pumped by the class of engine 
shown in the illustration. 

The improvement in the Cornish engine is 
capable of being more definitely stated than 
that of any other form, for it has been close- 
ly observed and tabulated for many years. 
The figures express what is called the duty. 
This term was adopted by Watt to express 
the actual amount of water lifted one foot 
by the bushel of coal. The duty, therefore, 
is the test of comparative merit of engines, 
and the figures following clearly indicate 
the improvement in the Cornish pumping 
engine : 



Year. Pounds, 1 foot high. 

1T69, the Newcomen engine 5,500,000 

1772, Newcomen engine, improved by 

Smeaton 9,500,000 

1778 to 1815, Watt engine 20,000,000 

1820, improved Cornish, average duty of 

a large number of engines 28,000,000 

1826, improved Cornish, average duty . . 30,000,000 
1830, improved Cornish, average duty . . 43,350,000 
1839, improved Cornish, average duty . . 54,000,000 
1850, improved Cornish, average duty . . 60,000,000 

There are some brilliant instances above 
these averages, as of the 

" Consolidated" mines, highest duty, 1827 . . 67,000,000 
" Fowey Consols" mines, highest duty, 1842. 97,000,000 

The duty of the best American pumping 
engines runs well up with these figures. 

Steam was first applied to drive cotton 
machinery by Richard Arkwright, in En- 
gland, in 1785, and to grind plaster and saw 
stone by Oliver Evans, in Philadelphia, 
about the same time. It was many years 
before the steam-engine was applied in the 
United States to factory use, but that ap- 
plication of the engine rapidly increased in 
England. It was Watt's engine in substan- 
tial respects, though other persons increased 
and harmonized the proportions, giving it a 
power and completeness far beyond what 
its admirable inventor lived personally to 
witness. 

STEAM NAVIGATION. 

The steam-engine was used for transporta- 
tion on the water before it was adapted to 
land carriages. This was owing to its hav- 
ing started as an atmospheric engine, where 
the force was derived from the pressure of 
air upon the piston when a partial vacuum 
was produced by the condensation of steam 
in the cylinder. The engine was relatively 
large and heavy, and in its proportions was 
better suited to a boat than to a wagon. 
The use of high-pressure steam was an after- 
thought. Though Watt, with his singular 
sagacity, added to his specification the idea 
of adapting high-pressure steam to the pur- 
poses of river and land locomotion, it was 
but as a caveat, for he built none. 

The origin of the steamboat has been a 
vexed question for nearly a century. As 
the parties who first worked at the problem 
with sticcess could not apportion among 
themselves the exact measure of credit to 
which each was entitled, so by carefully fan- 
ning the flames of national vanity the sub- 
ject has been kept afloat, and of three na- 



STEAMBOATS OF SYMINGTON AND FULTON. 



53 



tions each has its advocates, who feel 
bound to depreciate the claims of all oth- 
ers. The truth is, the engine was New- 
conien's, and then Watt's, and the boat 
was any body's ; and persons went to 
work here and there, with varying de- 
grees of success, depending upon polit- 
ical influence, social standing, moneyed 
resources, or friends thus provided, and 
last, not least, mechanical talent for har- 
nessing the engine to the paddle or propel- 
ler used to push against the water. 

In this struggle great pertinacity was ex- 
hibited in Scotland and America. To deal 
out the exact proportion of credit due to 
each man is not easy ; one measure is to be 
awarded to skill in mechanical adaptation, 
another to skill in fitting and proportioning. 

In 1780 was patented the present ar- 
rangement of connecting-rod, crank, and 
fly-wheel. The Marquis de Jouffroy in that 
year successfully worked a steamboat 140 
feet long on the Sa6ne. Joseph Bramah 
(1785) patented a rotatory engine on a pro- 
peller shaft. Here occurs the term " screw- 
propeller," since so common. In 1787 Pat- 
rick Miller, of Dalswinton, published a spec- 
ification of a triple boat, with paddles in the 
intervals, and a deck over the three boats. 
The same year a double boat was steamed 
on the Frith of Forth. John Fitch, of Phila- 
delphia, the next year obtained a patent for 
the application of steam to navigation in 
Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and 
Delaware. The boat had vertical recipro- 
cating paddles, and made eighty miles per 
day. It proceeded upon an entirely wrong 
principle. 

In 1802 Symington ran the Charlotte Bun- 
das on the Forth and Clyde Canal. She had 
a double-acting Watt engine, working by a 
connecting-rod to a crank on the paddle 
wheel shaft. This is the first instance of 
these parts being thus combined. 





Symington's steamboat, "ouaelotte dundab." 



FULTON'S STEAMBOAT, " OLEKMONT," 1807. 

The idea of canal use alone engaged the 
inventor, and the boat was rejected be- 
cause the canal banks were likely to be 
damaged. 

In 1804 John Cox Stevens, of New Jersey, 
constructed a boat on the Hudson, driven 
by a Watt engine, with a tubular boiler of 
his own invention. It had a bladed screw- 
propeller. The same year Oliver Evans had 
a stern-paddle-wheel boat on the Delaware 
and Schuylkill rivers. It was driven by a 
double-acting high-pressure steam-engine, 
which was the first of its kind, and was 
geared to rotate the wheels by which the 
boat was moved on land, and driven in the 
water when the power was transferred to 
the paddle-wheel at the stern. 

In 1807 Robert Fulton, of New York, went 
from that city to Albany in the Clermont, a 
boat of 160 tons burden, with side paddle- 
wheels, driven by an engine which he pur- 
chased when in England of Boulton and 
Watt. She ran during the remainder of the 
year as a passenger boat. She was the first 
that ran for practical purposes, and proved 
of value. The outside bearing of the pad- 
dle-wheel shaft and the guard were invent- 
ed by Fulton. The boat may be considered 
to have been about the sixteenth steam- 
boat ; nevertheless the popular verdict is a 
just and righteous one. To Fulton much 
more than to any other one man is due the 
credit of the introduction of steam naviga- 
tion. His enterprise opened the way, and 
he was the first to apportion the strength 
and sizes of parts to the respective strains 
and duties. He had previously seen Sym- 
ington's boat, and had launched an experi- 
mental one, 66 feet long, on the Seine. The 
former may have directed his attention to 
the matter, and the latter was a useful 
apprenticeship. Mr. Charles Brown had 
built for Mr. Fulton, between 1806 and 1812, 
six steamboats of lengths varying from 7b 



54 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 




bell's steamboat, "oo.met," 1812. 

to 175 feet, and tonnage 120 to 337, prior to 
the practical working of any steamboat in 
Europe. 

The first steamboat in the Mississippi Val- 
ley was tbe Orleans, of 100 tons, built at 
Pittsburg by Fulton and Livingston in 1811. 
She had a stern wheel, and went from Pitts- 
burg to New Orleans in fourteen days. The 
next was the Comet, of 25 tons, in 1814. She 
made three or four trips, was taken to pieces, 
aud the engine was set up in a cotton fac- 
tory. The Vesuvius, in 1814, was the next. 
She made a number of trips, but eventually 
exploded. 

Henry Bell, of Scotland, in 1812 built the 
Comet, of 30 tons, with side paddle-wheels, 
which plied between Glasgow and Green- 
ock on the Clyde, and the next year around 
the coasts of the British Isles. 

Iu 1818 the Walk-in-the- Water, of 360 tons, 
was built at Black Rock, Niagara River, by 
Noah Brown, of New York, for traffic on the 
lakes. Her Boulton and Watt engine was 
made in New York and transported by boat 
to Albany and by teams to Black Rock. The 
boilers were prepared in New York and sent 



piecemeal to the lake. The vessel was lost 
in a gale in 1821. 

In 1819 the Savannah, 380 tons burden, 
crossed the Atlantic from America, visited 
Liverpool, St. Petersburg, and Copenhagen, 
and returned. Six years later the Enterprise 
rounded the Cape of Good Hope and went 
to India. 

In 1838 the Great Western (1340 tons) and 
the Sirius steamed across the Atlantic from 
England. Two years afterward the Cunard 
line was started, and was followed by the 
Collins line in 1850. The Great Eastern was 
built in 1858, the French iron-clad La Gloire 
in 1859, the English iron -clad Warrior in 
1860, and the Ericsson Monitor in 1862. 

Feathering paddle-wheels, such as Mor- 
gan's, were largely used in the British navy. 
Manly's are somewhat noted here. Hol- 
land's oblique paddle float, and many oth- 
ers, might be noted were there room for de- 
tail. 

The steamboats of our American rivers 
and lakes have no equals in the world, nor 
are there such waters elsewhere to afford a 
theatre for such boats. 

The paddle-wheel has to a large extent 
given place to the screw-propeller. There 
is perhaps but one paddle-wheel steamer in 
the United States navy, the Powhatan. 

The screw-propeller was invented by 
numerous people, if we are to assume that 
each person who put forward a claim or 
who patented it supposed himself to be an 
original inventor. Several notices of it oc- 
cur, but it came more distinctly into notice 
when brought forward by Ericsson in 1836. 





PACIFIC MAIL STEAM-SHIP COMPANY'S BCEEW STEAM-8UIP " CITY OK PEKING." 



LOCOMOTIVE OF TEEVETHICK. 



55 



The supernaturally wise old sea-dogs and 
landsmen of the British Admiralty sneered 
at the innovation, but Captain Robert F. 
Stockton and Francis B. Ogden, of New Jer- 
sey, appreciated it. The former introduced 
it to the United States Navy Department, 
and the war steamer Princeton was launched 
upon the Delaware. The Robert F. Stockton, 
an iron vessel fitted with a screw-propeller, 
was launched upon the Mersey in 1838, and 
crossed to the United States the next year. 
Her name was changed to New Jersey, and 
she was the first screw-propeller vessel 
practically used in America, as Ericsson's 
Francis B. Ogden was the first in Europe. 
Ericsson accomplished for the screw-pro- 
peller in England and America what Fulton 
did for the paddle-wheel in America and 
Bell in England. 

Other improvements have been added, in- 
cluding Woodcroft's increasing pitch screw 
and Fowler's and Hunter's vertical sub- 
merged paddle-wheels. 

THE LOCOMOTIVE. 

It is not easy from the stand-point of the 
present to realize the original difficulty in 
adapting the steam-engine to 
the propulsion of carriages. 
There was a fixed belief in re- 
gard to steam, derived from the 
mode of using it in the atmos- 
pheric engine of Newcomen 
and from the cautious habit of 
Watt, that the safest method 
was merely to obtain a vacuum 
by its condensation, so as to 
bring the unbalanced atmos- 
pheric pressure upon one side 
of the piston. This involved a 
great weight and bulk of ma- 
chinery, and long prevented the 
adaptation of the engine to land 
transportation. The steamboat 
engine used by Miller, of Dal- 
swinton, in 1787 differed from 
Watt's in the saving of weight 
by the abolition of the air- 
pump, and depended upon 
abundant injection of water to 
produce a vacuum. Watt was 
afraid of high-pressure steam, 
and we can fancy, had he lived 
to be on board one of our West- 



ern river boats, and heard the energetic 
cough of the escaping steam, he would 
have wished himself safely back again with 
Brother Boulton, and among the models and 
drawing-boards of his sanctum at the "Soho 
Works." He had no faith in an engine with- 
out a condenser, and, as the event proved, 
no steam - carriage could succeed till the 
weight of the engine was reduced by the 
removal of the condenser, air-pump, and 
their cumbrous appendages, even at the ex- 
pense of greater cost of fuel in working. 

This situation continued until 1802, when 
two Cornish engineers, Trevethick and Viv- 
ian, obtained a patent for a steam-carriage 
adapted for common roads, or, by an adap- 
tation of the tires of the wheels, for rail- 
ways. The engine was built, and was tried 
and modified till 1805, when it became a 
useful locomotive on the Merthyr-Tydvil 
Railway, in South Wales, in drawing coal 
cars. It is the most remarkable engine in 
the history of the locomotive. It had a 
horizontal cylinder inclosed in the boiler, 
the piston and rod operating a crank axle, 
which communicated power through gear 
wheels to the axle of the driving-wheels. 




TREVETHICK AND VIVIAN'S LOCOMOTIVE, MERTIIYR-TYDVII., 1S05. 



56 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 




evans's locomotive. 



It was high-pressure, non-condensing, and 
exhausted into the chimney. (The latter 
is not shown in their official drawing.) It 
was the first locomotive to run on tram-ways 
or on rails. The steam-cocks were operated 
from the crank axle, as were also the feed- 
pump and the hellows for urging the fire. 
The body of the carriage followed the old 
English stage shape. It was not alone that 
these men devised several features that ex- 
perience has retained, but they were the 
first to disregard the prejudice against high 
steam, and to make a compact engine which 
would neither overtax the wheels nor take 
up all the room, to the exclusion of passen- 
gers and goods. 

Oliver Evans, of Philadelphia, labored for 
a number of years to obtain help to con- 
struct his high-pressure engine, which was 
built in 1802 for running a marble saw and 
plaster mill, and in 1804 was adapted to a 
scow for dredging in the Delaware River. 




By an ingenious band connection to wheels, 
or to a stern-wheel paddle shaft, he niado 
his scow travel on land or water, as the case 
might be. It was an ungainly affair, with 
vertical cylinder, working -beam, and fly- 
wheel — useless for land locomotion. Men- 
tion may also be made of M. Cugnot's car- 
riage, in 1769, with two single-acting verti- 
cal engines acting alternately upon the two 
front wheels. It is yet preserved in Par- 
is. Symington, in 1786, had also a steam- 
carriage with a Watt condensing engine. 
These engines lacked in several respects the 
conditions of success, but deserve mention. 

It was among the coal mines that tram- 
ways with tracks of flag-stones for the 
wheels of coal wagons first came into use ; 
it was also in the collieries that iron rails 
were first laid, and the wheels of cars made 
with grooves, and afterward with flanges, 
to enable them to keep on the track. It 
was twenty-five years after the use of the 
locomotive in South Wales before the rail- 
way was used except for transporting coal. 

The next locomotive after that of Treve- 
thick and Vivian was one made by Blenkin- 
sop in 1811 for working at the Hunslet-Moor 
Col liery, near Leeds. 1 The flat-faced wheels 
ran upon a tram-way, and a cog-wheel, driv- 
en by pinions and connecting rods from the 
pair of vertical cylinders, drove the engine 
by meshing into a rack on one side of the 
track. The idea prevailed at the time that 



BLHNKINBOP'S LOCOMOTIVE, "LORD WELLINGTON," 1811. 



i A large number of the illustrations for this pa- 
per have been borrowed from Knight's Mechanical 
Dictionary, published by J. B. Ford and Co., New 
York. 



LOCOMOTIVES OF HEDLEY AND STEPHENSON. 




hedley's locomotive, "puffing billy," 1813. 

the fractional adherence of the driving- 
wheels to the rail was not sufficient, but 
that the wheels would slip. The fire was 
built in a large tube passing through the 
boiler ; the tube was bent to form a chim- 
ney. It drew trains of thirty tous weight 
three and three-quarter miles per hour. 

In the spring of 1813 William Hedley built 
a locomotive with four smooth driving- 
wheels to run on a smooth rail. The ma- 
chine failed to accomplish much on ac- 
count of its small boiler. Hedley thereupon 
in the same year built another engine, 
shown above, having a return flue boiler, 
and mounted on eight driving- wheels, which 
were coupled together by intermediate gear- 
wheels on the axles, and all propelled by a 
gear in the centre, driven by a pitnian from 
the working-beam. 

Hedley's locomotive 
was objected to by resi- 
dents of Newcastle on 
account of the smoke. 
He therefore passed the 
smoke into a large re- 
ceiver (a), and turned 
the exhaust steam upon 
it. From the receiver 
the steam and smoke 
were conveyed by a pipe 
( b ) to the chimney, which 
device soon developed 
into the steam blast. 

" Puffing Billy" was at 
work more or less until 
1862, when it was laid up 
as a memorial in the 



British Patent-office Museum. Hedley died 
in 1842. 

In 1815 Dodd and Stephenson patented an 
engine with vertical cylinders. The adher- 
ence to this form was on account of its sup- 
posed value in pressing the wheels down 
upon the track. Stephenson, in 1825, made 
an engine for the KilLingworth Railway, and 
his engines were employed on iron tracks 
by the Stockton and Darlington Railway, 
and at the Newcastle collieries. His first 
locomotive on this railway had two vertical 
cylinders, and the driving-shaft had cranks 
at an angle of ninety degrees. The axles 
of the wheels were coupled by an endless 
chain passing around both axles. 

In 1829 the Liverpool and Manchester 
Railway, then the most extensive and fin- 
ished work of the kind ever undertaken, 
and the first passenger railway, was com- 
pleted, and the directors offered a reward 
of £500 for the best locomotive which should 
fulfill certain imposed conditions. Among 
these were that it was to consume its own 
smoke, draw three times its own weight at a 
rate of not less than ten miles an hour, and 
the boiler pressure was not to exceed fifty 
pounds per square inch. The weight was 
not to exceed six tons, nor the cost £550. 

Three engines competed — the " Rocket," 
constructed by George Stephenson ; the 
"Sanspareil," by Timothy Hackworth ; the 
" Novelty," by Messrs. Brathwaite and Erics- 
son. 

The " Rocket" weighed 4 tons 5 hundred- 
weight, and its tender, with water and coke, 




dodd's and Stephenson's looomotive, 1815. 



58 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



WMf 




BTEPHF.NSOn'8 LOCOMOTIVE, " EOOEET," 1S29. 

3 tons 4 hundred-weight. It had two loaded 
carriages attached, weighing a little over 9 
tons 10 hundred-weight. The greatest ve- 
locity attained was 24£ miles per hour, and 
the average consumption of coke per hour 
217 pounds. 

The " Sanspareil" attained a speed of 22§ 
miles per hour, hut with an expenditure of 
fuel per hour of 692 pounds. 

The " Novelty" carried its own water and 
fuel. In consequence of successive acci- 
dents to the working arrangements, this en- 
gine was withdrawn from competition. A 
fourth engine, the " Perseverance," hy Bur- 
stall, not heing adapted to the track, was 
withdrawn. 

The opening of the Liverpool and Man- 
chester Railway, September 15, 1829, was an 
era in civilization, and one of the first vic- 
tims of the iron horse was slain on that day 
— Mr. Huskisson, Home Secretary in the 
British cabinet. Eight locomotives were 
used on that day, and while the engines 
were watering at the Parkside station, some 
of the guests descended to the road. While 
Mr. Huskisson was talking to the Duke of 
Wellington the famous " Rocket" came by, 
knocked down Mr. Huskisson, and the wheels 
passed over his left leg. He was placed on 
board the " Northumbrian," driven by George 
Stephenson, who conveyed him fifteen miles 
in twenty-five minutes, at the rate of thir- 
ty-six miles an hour — the most marvelous 
achievement yet. Mr. Huskisson died the 
same night at Eccles. 

The " Rocket" engine was superseded in 
1837, as too light for the work, and was con- 
demned for life to the collieries. Here it 
proved itself capable of a rate of sixty miles 
;in hour; but being again convicted of levi- 
ty while on duty, it was cashiered, and its 
place filled by heavier machines of twelve 



tons. After a few years of inglorious re- 
tirement, some one, not totally oblivious of 
how it would look in history, recalled the 
old soldier from his limbo, and he now en- 
joys the company of his elder brother, Hed- 
ley's "Puffing Billy," in the English Patent- 
office Museum. 

The boiler (a) of the " Rocket" was a cyl- 
inder six feet long, and had twenty -five 
tubes. The fire-box (b) had two tubes com- 
municating with the boiler below and above, 
and was surrounded by an exterior casing, 
into which the water from the boiler flowed, 
and was maintained at the same level as that 
in the boiler. 

In the accompanying engraving (B) is 
shown a longitudinal vertical section of a 
modern English locomotive. The boiler is 
surrounded by two casings, one within the 
other, united by stays. The tubes (a) are 
of brass, 124 in number, and the boiler has 
longitudinal stays connecting the ends. 
Into the smoke-box (&) the blast-pipe (c) dis- 
charges. The steam from the upper part 
of the boiler enters the steam-dome (d), the 
amount being governed by a regulator con- 
trolled by a winch. This serves to obviate 
in a great degree the effects of priming. 





ENGLISH LOCOMOTIVES. 



AMERICAN LOCOMOTIVE. 



59 




AMERICAN LOOOMOTIVE— CENTRAL LONGITUDINAL SECTION. 

The engine has four drivers, 60?^ inches in diameter, and a four-wheeled swing-bolster truck, and weighs, 
with water and fuel, about 65,000 pounds. The flues, 144 in number, are 2 inches in diameter, and 11 feet 5 
inches in length. The fire-box, of cast steel, is 66 inches long, 34>£ inches wide, and 63 inches deep. Water 
space, 3 inches sides and back, 4 inches front. Grates, cast iron. The cylinders are horizontal. Valve motion 
graduated to cut off equally at all points of the stroke. The tires are of cast steel, and the wheel centres of 
cast iron with hollow spokes and rims; the wrist pins of cast steel, the connecting rods of hammered iron. 
The truck wheels are 28 inches in diameter. All the principal parts of these engines are interchangeable. 



The steam-pipe (e) has two branches, each 
entering one of the boxes containing the 
valves by which the flow of steam to the 
cylinders is controlled. 

In the same engraving is shown an ex- 
press engine (C) designed by Gooch for the 
Great Western Railway, where an unusual 
rate of speed is maintained. The boiler has 
305 tubes, two inches in diameter. The cyl- 
inders are eighteen inches in diameter, and 
twenty -four stroke, the driving-wheels eight 
feet in diameter, the heating surface of the 
fire-box 153 square feet. There is also an 
illustration (D) of an express engine de- 
signed by Crampton for the narrow gauge. 

The first locomotive run on rails outside 
of England was the " Stourbridge Lion," 
made by Stephenson, and brought from En- 
gland for the Delaware and Hudson Canal 
and Railroad Company by Horatio Allen. 
This was in August, 1829. It was soon 
found that English locomotives, adapted for 
gentle curves, were ill suited for the exi- 
gencies of American railroads, where curves 
of as small a radius as 200 feet were some- 
times employed. Mr. Peter Cooper devised 
an engine which solved the difficulty. This 
was also in 1829. 

The first railway in the United States was 
one of two miles long, from Milton to Quincy, 
Massachusetts, in 1826. The cars were drawn 
by horses. The Baltimore and Ohio was the 
first passenger railway in America, fifteen 
miles being opened in 1830, the cars being 



drawn by horses till the next year, when a 
locomotive was put on the track, built by 
Davis, of York, Pennsylvania. It had an 
upright boiler and cylinder. The Mohawk 
and Hudson, sixteen miles, from Albany to 
Schenectady, was the next line opened, and 
the cars were drawn by horses till the de- 
livery of the locomotive " De Witt Clinton," 
which was built at the West Point Foundry, 
New York. This was the second locomotive 
built in the United States ; the first was 
made at the same shop for the South Caro- 
lina Railway. 

The above engraving represents a central 
longitudinal section of an approved form of 
American locomotive engine as made at the 
Baldwin Locomotive Works, Philadelphia. 

The ordinary speed attained on English 
railways is greater 
than that usual in 
this country. The 
Great Western Ex- 
press, from London 
to Exeter, travels at 
the rate of forty- 
three miles an hour, 
including stoppages, 
or fifty-one miles an 
hour while actually 
running. Midway 
between some of the 
stations a speed of 
sixty miles an hour 
is attained, and on 




u*~ 



AMERICAN LOCOMOTIVE — 
END ELEVATION AND 
TRANSVERSE SECTION. 



60 



M E( ' 1 IANICAL PROGRESS. 



experimental trips seventy miles an hour 
has been reached, or nearly thirty -three 
yards per second. 

Very high speed has been attained on 
special occasions on American roads, prob- 
ably fully equal to any time ever made in 
England. For instance, it is stated that a 
train conveying sonic officials of the New 
York Central Railroad made the distance 
from Rochester to Syracuse, eighty-one 
miles, in sixty-one minutes — said to be the 
fastest lime ever made in America. 

The lite of a locomotive engine is stated 
in a paper read before the British Associa- 
tion at thirty years. Some of the small 
parts require renewal every six months. 
The boiler tubes last live years, and the 
crank axles six years ; tires, boilers, and fire- 
boxes, seven to ten years; the side frames, 
axles, ami other parts, thirty years. During 
this period the total cost of repairs is esti- 
mated at $24,450 in American money, the 
original cost of the engine being $8490. It 
therefore requires for repairs in eleven years 
a sum equal to its original cost. In this time 
it is estimated t hat an engine in average use 
has run 220,000 miles. 

COTTON MANUFACTURE. 

Cotton was known to the ancients as tree- 
wool, being mentioned by Herodotus, Pliny, 
and many others. It was introduced into 
Spain by the Arabs, and flourished as long 
as religious toleration existed in the penin- 
sula, ami from this land it reached the less 
civilized parts of Europe. "When the best 
part of the inhabitants was expelled, when 
the University of Cordova became a thing 
forgotten in the peninsula, when the mem- 
ory nf Alha/cn was lost, and the era of the 
Pedros and Philips commenced, then the 
Cotton-plant too faded away, and all the in- 
dustries growing out id' this beautiful staple 
expired. 

Cotton was, however, known to the Mexi- 
cans when discovered by Cortez. This man 
without ;i conscience sent of his stolen goods 
to Charles V. "cotton mantles, some all 
white, others mixed with white and black, 
or red. green, yellow, and blue; waistcoats, 
counterpanes, tapestries, and carpets of cot- 
ton; ami the colors of the cotton were ex- 
tremely tine.'" 1 

1 Clavigero's Conquest of Mexico. 



Although there are several native Amer- 
i < ■ : i ii \ arieties of cotton, our plant is a native 
of India, and it has formed the staple mate- 
rial of garments there from time immemorial. 

Cotton goods were made in Manchester in 
1641, of " cotton-wool brought from Smyrna 
and Cyprus." Cotton seed was brought to 
England from the Levant, taken thence to 
the Bahamas, and thfence to Georgia in 1786. 
The first cotton mill in America was at Bev- 
erly, Massachusetts, 1787. Slater's mill w r as 
erected at Pawtucket in 1789. Slater was 
an apprentice of Strutt and Arkwright, and 
introduced into the United States the Ark- 
wright system of associated and combined 
machines, being the founder of the New 
England factory practice. The success of 
these mills is referred to in the report of Al- 
exander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasu- 
ry, 1791, who proposed to remove the duty 
on cotton, as it was "not a production of 
the country," and to "extend the duty of 
seven and a half per cent, to all imported 
cotton goods." 

The beauty and softness of the goods 
made of this material, which was new to the 
people of Europe, recommended it to per- 
sons of means and taste, and the importa- 
tion from India assumed large proportions. 
The names of calico and muslin, from Cali- 
ent and Moussoul, indicate clearly enough 
whence the market was supplied at an early 
day. The English manufacturers struggled 
against many difficulties, three of which may 
be named — the lack of snitable machinery; 
the opposition of the wool trade, which in- 
duced the authorities even to hang crimi- 
nals in cotton garments to render the goods 
unpopular ; and the lack of supply of cotton. 

The cotton from the boll yields only from 
one-quarter to one-third ginned fibre, and 
the labor of removing the seed by hand 
seemed at this critical moment to set a lim- 
it to the production, or at least render it so 
expensive that the goods could not come 
into general use among the masses of the 
people, who were used to being tolerably 
well fed and housed, and could not live on 
twopence a day and support their families, 
like the Hindoos. It is true that in India a 
sort of roller-gin had been in use from time 
immemorial — one which pinched the fibre 
and carried it away from the seed, whose 
size prevented it from passing between the 



COTTON-GIN AND CARDING-MACHINE. 



61 



rollers; but this was comparatively slow, 
and does not appear to have been known in 
America, where the hand-picking was in 
vogue. Besides, it is only suitable for cer- 
tain staples of cotton. The great need of 
the producer and the manufacturer was a 
machine to remove the cotton from the seed 
with rapidity and economy. 

At this juncture appears Eli Whitney, of 
Massachusetts, who in 1794 patented the 
cotton-gin. The name gin is short for engine, 
and is a frequent curt expression for a 
handy machine. Whitney's saw-gin (A) com- 
prises two cylinders of different diameters 
mounted in a wooden frame, and turned by 
a handle or belt and pulley so as to rotate 
in opposite directions, the brush cylinder 
the faster. The smaller cylinder carries on 
its circumference from sixty to eighty cir- 
cular saws, and the larger cylinder a series 
of brushes. The teeth of the saws pass in 
between a number of bars, forming a grat- 
ing. The cotton, as picked from the pods, 
is thrown into the hopper; the saws strip 
the fibre from the seeds, which fall through 
the bottom of the hopper, while the wool is 
cleansed from the teeth of the saws, and de- 
livered by a sloping table into 1 a recepta- 
cle below. A more modern and complete 
form of the machine (B) is shown in our en- 
graving. 

The crop of cotton increased from 189,316 
pounds in 1791 to 2,000,000,000 pounds in 
1859. Whitney and his partner received 
$50,000 from the State of South Carolina, 
and a tariff of so much per saw per annum 
from the States of North Carolina and 
Georgia for a short term of years. 

After the gin come the opener and scutcher, 
which separate the locks of cotton, remove 
the dirt, and convert the tangled fibre into 
a light and flocculent bat or lap. The ma- 
chines of this stage of the process have a 
number of names, the marks of the rough 
humor of the Lancashire men among whom 
they originated. They were known as wil- 
lowers, from the practice of beating with 
willow wands, or as devils and wolves, from 
their toothed drums, which tore the locks 
apart, the fibre passing from one to anoth- 
er, and the dust and dirt being carried off 
by a suction blast, or falling through the 
meshes of wire-cloth into a box beneath the 
machine. 




wiiitney's ootton-gin. 

The carding-machine reduces the mass of 
cotton to a fleece or sliver, the fibres laid 
parallel, so that they may bo drawn and 
twisted into a yarn. Hand cards were not 
superseded by machine cards until about 
1770, although attempts had been made at 
carding -machines by Lewis Paul in 1748, 
and by Hargreaves in 1760. To the latter, 
to Arkwright, and to Mr. Peele, the father 
of the first Sir Eobert and the grandfather 
of the statesman, the invention is ascribed. 
It was hardly possible that this necessary 
link in the chain of machines should long 
lack a discoverer. 

Lewis Paul in his patent of 1748 had a 
number of parallel cards on a bed, or on a 
cylinder, with intervening spaces. It was 
used in connection with an upper card or a 
concave, and when the strips were full they 
were taken off, and the roving removed from 
each. Peele in 1779 introduced the cylinder. 
His machine had strips of card around the 
drum to give separate slivers or carclings, and 
a can, which rotated on its base, to give a 
slight twist to the rovings. This was per- 
haps the first roving can. The card-sticking 
machine was invented by Amos Wliittemore, 
of Massachusetts, and patented by him in 
1797. 

Next in order of operation, though the 
first to feel the rising tide of invention, was 
the spinning machine. In ancient Egypt, 



G2 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 




SPINNING-WHEEL. 



Phoenicia, Arabia, India, Greece, and Rome 
the distaff and spindle were the means of 
spinning. The spinning-wheel may have orig- 
inated among onr cousins of Hindostan, as 
it was certainly known there at a somewhat 
distant period ; it appears in our illuminated 
missals of the fourteenth century, but only 
among the lady population, being used by 
spinsters and matrons of rank. The great 
bulk of the spinning was by the distatf, 
which indeed is still used in many parts of 
the continent of Europe. Among English- 
speaking peoples it survived latest iu the 
flax-wheel, in which a continuous thread was 
spun from a tussock of combed flax held 
upon a distaff at one end of the machine. 

So far as we are concerned, the commence- 
ment of our century finds the spinning of 
cotton and wool in the condition of many 
previous ages and centuries ; it was done 
upon hand spinning-wheels. This was true 
as to work done for the household and that 
which was done in the way of business, be- 
ing distributed by the spinning masters of 
a neighborhood to the operatives, who did 
the work at their own houses. When Har- 
greaves invented the spinning-jenny in 1768 
cotton and woolen mills were unknown. 

The wool being carded into rolls in which 
the fibres were arranged in one direction, the 
spinner attached the end of one to the spindle, 
which was then revolved by whirling the 
large wheel, a band passing over the periph- 



ery of the latter and over a little pulley on 
the spindle. The left hand of the opera- 
tor drew out the roll as it was twisted, the 
degree of its elongation and the hardness of 
the twist depending upon the distance it was 
pulled out and the number of revolutions. 
In practice, the spinner steps back a dis- 
tance after setting the wheel a-whirling, 
and, when the twist is satisfactory, by shift- 
ing the yarn from the point to the shaft of 
the spindle, and then setting the spindle 
again in motion, the yarn is wound upon 
the spindle, excepting the end of the yarn, 
which is left projecting from the point for 
the attachment of another roll. Another 
feature must also be noticed, as it has a very 
close bearing upon what was followed in the 
most perfect known spinning machine, the 
mule, of which more presently. The spin- 
ner, after drawing out the roll, giving the 
wheel a whirl, and walking backward from 
it, dropped the roving, and then, advancing 
to the spindle, took the roving between the 
finger and thumb ; then, giving a rapid rev- 
olution to the wheel, she walked backward 
away, allowing the roving to slip through 
the grip with just such friction as would 
secure the required tightness of twist. This 
done, the yarn was wound upon the spindle, 
and the double process repeated with an- 
other carded roll. 

This was the way with wool, and subse- 
quently with cotton; but it Avas not until 
the rising demand for cotton yarn occurred 
that machinery was invented to supplement 
the individual exertions of the spinner. 
Machinery was first applied to silk, but the 
material was expensive, the demand limit- 
ed, and the process essentially different. 
Lewis Paid led off in this line of invention 
in his patent of 1738, in which he introduced 
the idea of successive pairs of drawing roll- 
ers for elongating the roving, the speed of the 
consecutive pairs increasing so that each 
pulled upon the roving between it and the 
preceding pair, the eventual extension de- 
pending upon the relative rates of the in- 
crease of speed of the successive pairs. He 
also gave to one or more of the pairs of roll- 
ers a revolution in a plane at right angles 
to that of their individual rotation, so as to 
give a twist to the yarn. This invention is 
said to have originated with Wyatt, Paul 
being only a promoter; however that may 



SPINNING-JENNY. 



63 



have been, it was not successful, owing, 
doubtless, partly to want of skill in the 
making, and also to intrinsic difficulties, for 
the same invention, in a modified form, was 
patented in 1848, and bad a fair trial on a 
large scale in Rhode Island before it was 
finally abandoned. 

In 1758 Lewis Paul tried again to adapt 
machinery to the work. This invention 
was the precursor of the bobbin-and-fly frame. 
He seems to have been unfortunate in his 
combinations. 

The cardings being attached endwise, are 
fed between rollers which deliver the long 
sliver to a bobbin, which takes it up faster 
as to length than it is delivered by the roll- 
ers, and so stretches it according to the 
quality required. There is an indistinct 
intimation of a flyer in the drawing of this 
machine in the stretch between the feed 
rollers and the bobbins. Had he put the 
drawing rollers of his former patent to the 
feed rollers and bobbin of his new one, he 
might, perhaps, have forestalled Arkwright. 

Hargreaves's spinning-jenny was the direct 
outgrowth of the spinuiug-wheel, unlike 
the Paul drawing head, which had a radical- 
ly different construction. Something had 
to be done to meet the increased demand 
for cotton yarn. James Hargreaves was the 
man for the occasion. It is said that the 
first suggestion in the right direction was 
caused by the upsetting of a spinning-wheel 
by one of his children. It continued to run 
when the spindle was vertical. Here was the 
solution. He had frequently tried to spin 
several yarns at once on as many spindles, 
but the latter being horizontal, the yarns 
interfered. He made a machine in 1764 
with eight vertical spindles in 
a row, fed by eight rovings, 
which were held by a fluted 
wooden clasp of two parallel 
slats. The ends of the rovings 
being attached to the spindles, 
the wheel was revolved by 
the right hand, rotating the 
spindles, and the clasp which 
lightly clipped the rovings 
was drawn away from the 
spindles, paying out the rov- 
ing, which was twisted by the 
rotation of the spindles, and 
stretched by the retraction of 



the clasp and the amount taken up by the 
twist. When the clasp reached the back 
of the machine the yarn was wound on the 
spindles, the clasp resumed its place near 
them, fresh rovings were pieced on to the 
ends of the former ones, and the work was 
repeated. 

The clasp was, as it were, a long finger 
and thumb to hold a row of rovings, and 
the machine was eventually made to con- 
tain as many as eighty spindles. Hargreaves 
spun in secret so much yarn that the jeal- 
ous workmen broke into his house and de- 
stroyed the machine. He deviated a little 
from his first design in drafting the specifi- 
cation for his patent of 1770. He there had 
a series of bobbins holding stubs — soft rov- 
ings having but little twist — which pass 
from thence to a row of spindles, all ro- 
tated from a common driving-wheel. Be- 
tween the two, with divisions for the slubs, 
was a clasp, which was managed by the left 
hand, to bring such a pressure upon the rov- 
ing as the required twist might warrant. 
A presser-ivire regulated the winding of the 
yarn on the spindles in the intervals of 
spinning. 

It being proved that he had sold several 
of his machines before his application for a 
patent, the latter was set aside, and he nev- 
er was reasonably remunerated. 

When the machine of Arkwright, which 
is next in order of date, came into use, the 
spinning-jenny of Hargreaves still held its 
superiority in yarn, the product being used 
for the weft, while the water-twist of the Ark- 
wright roller-machine was used for the warp. 
Subsequently the principal features of the 
jenny were embodied with others selected 




HAKOBEAVEB 8 SPINNING-JENNY. 



C4 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 




ark wright's spinning machine (from the original drawing) 

from the Arkwright drawing frame to form 
what was playfully termed the mule, by 
which name it is universally known up to 
date. It was said also that until the inven- 
tion of the Arkwrigkt machine cotton yarn 
was seldom used for warp, owing to its soft- 
ness ami weakness, the jenny not giving a 
sufficiently hard twist to hear the strain of 
the loom. Goods were therefore usually 
made, at the period referred to, with a linen 
warp and cotton woof. 

Arkwright's invention for " making of 
weft or yarn from cotton, tlax, and wool," 
patented 1769, was the most brilliant of its 
time and class. It was designed to be driven 
by horse-power, a band from a drum on the 
master-wheel shaft giving mot ion to the va- 
rious parts. It was much improved in later 
years, and was driven by water-power after 
its success justified larger operations. This 
soon followed, and in 1785 steam-power was 
first applied to cotton spinning. The cotton 
rovings were wound upon large bobbins at 
the lt.uk upper part of the machine, and 
were drawn from them by four pairs of 
drawing rollers, which, moving with a gradu- 
ated accelerated speed, elongated the rov- 
ings, and passed them to the flyers and 
spindles on the lower part of the machine. 



The four essen- 
tial parts of this 
apparatus have 
not been dis- 
pensed with in 
ordinary spin- 
ning, and con- 
stitute the hob- 
bin-and-fly frame, 
or roving -frame, 
which bids fair to 
hold its ground 
for spinning or- 
dinary numbers 
to the end of 
time. 

The drawing 
rollers were sug- 
gested by the 
Lewis Paul ma- 
chine of 1738; 
but the flyers 
and the general 
combination are 
of the highest 
order of merit, and are to be attributed to 
Arkwright. 

Reference has been made in the introduc- 
tory remarks to the factory system initiated 
by Arkwright in his cottou mills, 1768-1785. 
Arkwrigkt was the first man to associate 
consecutively the various processes in cot- 
ton manufacture under the same roof. This 
series of machines for carding, drawing, and 
roving was patented in 1785, and from Ark- 
wright's period we date the origin of the 
factory system. This was the year after the 
ratification by Congress of the definitive 
treaty of peace signed at Paris, and four 
years before Washington became President. 
Thenceforward the system had but to 
grow and extend; to grow, in bringing oth- 
er departments of the cotton manufacture, 
and eventually those of wool, flax, and 
hemp, into the same method; to extend, 
in respect of its boundaries, geographical 
and economical — the latter by the inaugura- 
tion of parallel practices in other interests, 
such as the working of metal, leather, and 
wood. 

The invention of cotton machinery was 
no exception to the general rule: Arkwright 
did best what had been attempted before. 
Arkwright had his Lewis Paul, just as Fulton 



MULE SPINNER. 



65 



had his Symington and Enmsey, and as Ste- 
phenson had his Trevethick and Hedley. 

Many other improvements might he cited, 
such as Jenks's ring-and-traveler spinner, if 
we had the space. The list of spinning ma- 
chines closes with the mule, and at present 
there is nothing better to offer. The per- 
fected mule has been called the " iron man" 
from the wondrous skill with which it oper- 
ates. Apparently instinct with life and feel- 
ing, it performs its allotted course as implic- 
itly as a mere water-wheel, but the exqui- 
site provisions for timing — what may be 
called the opportuneness of its movements 
— give it an air of volition and prevision. 
These features belong to the automatic mule, 
or the self-acting mule, as it also called. It 
was not thus in the original mule of Cromp- 
ton. In this the main features were present, 
but were brought into and continued in ac- 
tion by the care and judgment of the opera- 
tor. 

Samuel Crompton was a young weaver 
when he applied his mind to the solution of 
the problem how to make a machine which 
should avoid certain faults present in the 
Hargreaves and the Arkwright machines. 
This he succeeded in doing in 1779. He 
placed his spindles on a traveling carriage, 
which backed away from the roving bob- 
bins to stretch and twist a length of the rov- 
ings, and then ran back to wind the yarn 
upon the spindles. The immediate object 
was to deliver the roving with the required 
degree of attenuation, and twist it as deliv- 
ered. The work of this machine was finer 
than any heretofore produced, and the im- 
proved self-acting mule still maintains its 
superior character. Even at the first it was 
called the " muslin wheel," as its yarns ri- 
valed in softness the finer kinds from India. 
Crompton took no patent for it, but was re- 
warded with a Parliamentary grant of £5000 
thirty -three years afterward. He died in 
1827. 

Previous to the invention of the mule few 
spinners could make yarns of 200 hanks to 
the pound, the hank being always 840 yards. 
The natives of India were at the same time 
making yarns of numbers varying from 300 
to 400. By the best constructed mules yarn 
has been made in Manchester of number 700, 
which was woven in France. The illustra- 
tion will give an idea of the machine, though 
5 




MULE SPINNER. 

it has not the complicated parts of the self- 
acting mule. 

The mule of Crompton had only twenty 
to thirty spindles, and the distance traveled 
by the carriage was five feet. The distance 
traveled is now much greater, and some 
mules carry 1200 spindles. 

The drawing and stretching action of the 
mule spinner makes the yarn finer and of a 
more uniform tenuity than the mere draw- 
ing and twisting action of the throstle. As 
delivered by the rollers, the thread is thick- 
er in some parts than in others ; these thick- 
er parts, not being so effectually twisted as 
the smaller parts, are softer, and yield more 
readily to the stretching power of the mule ; 
by this means the twist becomes more equa- 
ble throughout the yarn. 

The mule carriage carrying the spindles 
recedes from the rollers with a velocity some- 
what greater than the rate of delivery of 
the reduced roving, the rapid revolution of 
the spindles giving a twist to the yarn, 
which stretches it still farther. When the 
rollers cease giving out the rovings, the 
mule spinner still continues to recede, its 
spindles still revolving, and thus the stretch- 
ing is effected. 

When the drawing, stretching, and twisting 
of the yarn are thus accomplished, the mule 
disengages itself from the parts of the car- 
riage by which it has been driven, and the 
carriage is returned to the rollers, the thread 
being wound in a cop upon the spindle as 
the carriage returns. 

The specific difference between the action 
of the throstle and the mule is, that the 



66 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



former has a continuous action upon the 
roving, drawing, twisting, and winding it upon 
the spindle, while the mule draws and twists 
at one operation as the carriage runs out, 
and then winds all the lengths upon the 
spindles as the carriage runs in. The auto- 
matic disengagement is the invention of 
Roberts, in 1830, and of Mason. 

The jenny and the drawing frame being 
fairly at work, the cry was now, " What is 
to become of the yarn ? there will not be 
hands enough to weave it." The Rev. Ed- 
mund Cartwright set himself to the solution 
of the problem, and took out a patent for a 
power-loom in 1785, and a second in 1787. 
He was at great expense, and worked under 
the disadvantage of being a poor mechanic, 
having very little judgment in the propor- 
tion of parts or the convenient modes for 
the transmission of motion. One of the 
great difficulties in his way was in the fluffy 
and spongy character of the warp, and in 
the necessity for stopping the loom to dress 
a length of warp. This was avoided by the 
invention of the sizing and dressing machine 
of Radcliffe, of Stockport, in 1802, which took 
the yarns from the warping machine, carried 
them between two rollers, one of which re- 
volved in a reservoir of thin paste, then be- 
tween brushes, which rid the yarns of super- 
fluous and uneven paste, then over a heat- 
ed copper box, which dried them, and then 
wound them on the yarn-beam of the loom. 
The power-loom was only extensively adopt- 
ed about 1801 — the year of expiration of 



Cartwright's principal patent. He received 
£10,000 from Parliament. The justness of 
Cartwright's claim to the power-loom maybe 
appreciated when it is stated that his loom, 
patented in 1787, has automatic mechanical 
devices to operate all parts. It was a memo- 
rable success for a man of letters, whose first 
attempt at a power-loom was made in 1784, 
before he had ever seen a loom. Eventually, 
by the exertions of Horrocks, of Stockport, 
in 1803, and the adaptation of the steam- 
engine to the work, the power-loom became 
fixed in use. Jacquard, of Lyons, France, 
Roberts, of Manchester, England, and more 
lately Bigelow, Crompton, and Lyall, of this 
country, have brought the machine to a de- 
gree of perfection which is a marvel to the 
uninitiated, and an object of respect to those 
who happen to be a little better informed in 
technical matters. 

It may be mentioned that the mill atWal- 
tham, Massachusetts, erected in 1813, was the 
first in the world in which were combined 
machines for all the processes which convert 
the raw cotton into cloth. The mills of Ark- 
wright, at Cromford, in Derbyshire, erected 
1771-75, and that of Slater, at Pawtucket, 
Rhode Island, 1790, had no power-looms. 

Crompton is a name twice famous in the 
history of the manufacture of fibre. His 
loom, represented in the accompanying cut, 
is not a loom for cotton, but a more compli- 
cated structure for figure -weaving, as in 
carpet-making. 

The Jacquard loom is the most distiuct- 




OUOAIl'TON B FANCY loom. 



WEAVING AND DYEING. 



67 



ively curious in the list of looms. Jac- 
quard, of Lyons, is reported to have con- 
ceived the idea in 1790, and in 1801 he 
received from the National Exposition a 
bronze medal for his invention of a machine 
for figure-weaving, which he patented. 

The appendage to the loom which consti- 
tutes the Jacquard attachment is to elevate 
or depress the warp threads for the recep- 
tion of the shuttle, the action being pro- 
duced by cards with punched holes, which 
admit the passage of needles which gov- 
ern the warp threads. The holes in a card 
represent the warps to be raised for a cer- 
tain passage of the shuttle, and the needles, 
dropping into the holes, govern the forma- 
tion of the shed so that the required threads 
of warp come to the surface. The next card 
governs the next motion of the warps ; and 
so on, the required color being brought up 
or kept up, as the case may be. For figured 
stuff, from the finest silk to the most solid 
carpet, figured velvets and Wilton carpets, 
we are indebted to the genius of Jacquard, 
who made it possible to do by machinery 
what was before an expensive operation 
requiring skillful hands. 

While the art of the dyer is as old as 
Tyre, and the colors of antiquity are not, 
perhaps, excelled in lustre and stability, the 
variety has increased, and the modes have 
become more numerous and cheap. Dye 
baths and mordants were well understood in 
India two thousand years ago, as were also 
one or more styles of calico-printing, includ- 
ing chintz patterns and the resist process, 
which helped to make the fortunes of the 
Peele family. 

Pliny refers to the skill of the Egyptians 
as "wonderful" in imparting to white robes 
a number of colors by steeping " with dye- 
absorbing drugs" (mordants), after which 
the goods take on several tints when boiled 
in a dye bath of one color. Cortez was met 
in Mexico by people who wore cotton dresses 
with Dolly Varden patterns in black, blue, 
red, yellow, and green. 

These instances, which are but a tithe of 
what offers, show that calico-printing is old 
enough, and, indeed, it was practiced as a 
profession at Augsburg at the latter part of 
the seventeenth century, about which time 
it was introduced into England. Hand proc- 
esses, however, were all that were known. 



Their nature it is not so easy to determine, 
but Robert Peele, a farmer of Blackburn, in- 
vented the method of printing by blocks, each 
cut out to correspond with its part of the 
pattern, and laid in apposition by means 
of register pins. This may have been about 
1776, a year or two before his inveution of 
the mangle and the cylinder carding-machine, 
the roller principle of which seems to have 
suggested the calico-printing machine (1785), 
which has its pattern engraved on the face 
of a cylinder, and which, with various im- 
provements in detail, remains in use to the 
present day. The object he chose for his 
first attempt at hand-printing was a pars- 
ley leaf. The women of his family ironed 
the goods, and he was long called, without 
intentional disparagement, " Parsley - leaf 
Peele." 

In this machine the pattern for each color 
is engraved on a cylinder which revolves so 
as to chip its lower surface in a trough of 
color ; the face of each cylinder is scraped 
clean by a blade called a doctor, leaving the 
color only in the engraved lines ; the cloth 
passes against the cylinders in turn, and re- 
ceives a portion of its pattern from each. 
By an American improvement the number 
of cylinders which may be applied to each 
web is increased to twelve. The mode of 
engraving the cylinders has undergone a 
complete change since the invention by Ja- 
cob Perkins, of Massachusetts, of the roller- 
die and transfer process, in which a design 
on an engraved and subsequently hardened 
steel die is impressed into the copper cylin- 
der in repetition to any required extent. 

Robert Peele was also fortunate in secur- 
ing two very valuable processes, known as 
the discharge and resist styles. The latter he 
is said to have bought of a commercial trav- 
eler for £5, and to have made £250,000 by 
it. The discharge style is a process in which 
the cloth is printed with a material which 
prevents the mordant from becoming fast, so 
that when the dye is applied and the cloth 
washed, the dye is not fast at those places. 
The resist style is one in which the cloth 
has a pattern printed in paste, and is then 
dyed in indigo. The paste resists the color- 
ing matter, and these parts are white on a 
blue ground when the cloth is washed. 

The name of Peele, the self-taught dyer 
and mechanic, and his son and grandson, the 



68 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



two sir Roberts, the latter being the states- 
man who was killed by a fall from his horse 
in 1850, are indissoluble associated with the 
cotton manufacture, and more specifically 
with l he carding and I he calico-printing. 



Early memorials point to the use of 
stone and flint, of oopper and bronze, 
before the era of iron commenced, though 
the extraction of iron from its ore and its 
forging into shape antedate the historic pe- 
riod. Moses and the Hebrew chroniclers, 
1450 TOO B.C., Jol>, Homer, Ezekiel, Hesiod, 

Aristotle, Thuoydides, Xenophon, Diodorus, 
and Pliny refer to the metal. It has been 
found by Belzoni, Vyce, Abbott, and Mari- 
ette in positions which indicate its use at 
the building of the Pyramids and the erec- 
tion of the Sphinxes, and by Layard at 
Nimroud. The production of iron in large 
quant Lties is, however, quite recent, and the 
casting of it was an unexpected result inci- 
dent to the enlargement of the furnace, tho 
increased power of blast, and perhaps in 
part to the working of certain ores which 
w ere not so tractable under rude methods. 

Pure iron is almost infusible, and the an- 
cient processes succeeded in reducing the 
metal to a spongy condition, the impurities 
being removed by fluxes in the form of a 
slag, and by subsequent hammering and 
reheating. The product was a steel, and 
was produced in one process from the ore. 
In many parts of the world very widely 
separated the same methods were used. In 
small cold-blast furnaces rich ore is heat- 
ed in contact with incandescent charcoal, 
the viscid mass being hammered to remove 
earthy impurities. This plan is yet prac- 
ticed in India, Africa, Malaya, Madagascar, 
and formed the 

" Mass of iron, shapeless from the forge," 

offered by Achilles as a prize at the funer- 
al games of Patroclus, recorded in Homer's 
Iliad. 

Dr. Livingstone refers to the iron-smelt- 
ing furnaces of the tribes encountered in 
his Expedition to the Zambesi. The articles 
produced by these peoples are hammers, 
tonus, hoes, adzes, fish-hooks, needles, and 
spear-heads. The assagais of the Caffres 
are made of iron similarly procured, and 



of excellent quality. The ivootz of India 
is still produced in the manner partially 
described by Aristotle when speaking of 
India, and by Diodorus Siculus, referring to 
the iron ores of the island of Ethalia. 




IKON FURNACE OF THE KOLS, HINDOSTAN. 

Our illustration represents a blast-furnace 
of the Kols, a tribe of iron smelters in Lower 
Bengal and Orissa. The men are nomads, 
going from place to place, as the abundance 
of ore and wood may prompt them. The 
charcoal in the furnace being well ignited, 
ore is fed in alternately with charcoal, the 
fuel resting on the inclined tray, so as to be 
readily raked in. As the metal sinks to the 
bottom, slag runs off at an aperture above 
the basin, which is occupied by a viscid mass 
of iron. The blowers are two boxes with 
skin covers, which are alternately depress- 
ed by the feet and raised by the spring 
poles. Each skin cover has a hole in the 
middle, which is stopped by the heel as 
the weight of the person is thrown upon 
it, and is left open by withdrawal of the 
foot as the cover is raised. 

Variously modified in detail and increased 
in size, these simple furnaces are to be found 
in several parts of Europe, the Catalan and 
Swedish furnaces resembling in all proba- 
bility those of the Chalybes, so famous in 
.Marathon (490 B.C.), and those of the fdbrioa 
or military forge established in England by 
Hadrian (A.I). 120) at Hath, in the vicinity 
of iron ore and wood. The brave islanders 
met their Roman invaders with scythes, 



MAKING IRON WITH COAL. 



69 



swords, and spears of iron, and the export 
of that metal from thence shortly afterward 
is mentioned by Strabo. 

During the Roman occupation of England 
some of the richest beds of iron ore were 
worked, and the debris and cinders yet ex- 
ist to testify to two facts — one, that the 
amount of material treated was immense ; 
the other, that the plans adopted were 
wasteful, as it has since been found profit- 
able to work the cinders over again. 

During the Saxon occupation the furnaces 
were still in blast, especially in Gloucester- 
shire. 

The early Norman sovereigns were so in- 
tent upon skinning the Jews and Saxons 
that it became dangerous to succeed in any 
business, success inviting the barons to 
plunder. Accordingly we find in the time 
of King John that iron and steel were im- 
ported from Germany. 

The business lumbered along for some 
centuries, the government tinkering at it 
now and again, the exportation being pro- 
hibited in the fourteenth century, and the 
importation of iron in the fifteenth century. 

The direct method of obtaining wrought 
iron from the ore prevailed until the com- 
mencement of the fifteenth century, and 
then gradually gave way to a less direct 
process, but one more convenient in the 
handling of large quantities. Furnaces, 
operating by the aid of a strong blast, to 
melt the iron and obtain cast iron, which is 
carbureted in the process, were in use in 
the neighborhood of the Rhine about 1500. 
A second process in a forge hearth was used 
to eliminate the carbon and other impuri- 
ties, and the result was wrought iron. 

The statement is shortly made, but it took 
several centuries to accomplish it with wood, 
and several other centuries to devise means 
for substituting pit-coal for charcoal. 

In the reign of Elizabeth blast-furnaces 
were of sufficient size to produce from two 
to three tons of pig-iron per day by the use 
of charcoal. In the small works the iron 
was made malleable before being withdrawn 
from the blast-furnace, and in larger works 
was treated by the refinery furnace. 

Wood becoming scarce, and a number of 
furnaces having gone out of blast, in 1612 
Simon Sturtevant was granted a patent for 
thirty-one years for the use of pit-coal in 



smelting iron. Failing in his proposed 
plans, he rendered up his patent in the fol- 
lowing year. Successive persons applied 
for a patent for the same, the government 
continuing desirous of encouraging the de- 
velopment of home resources. Dudley in 
1619 succeeded in producing three tons of 
iron per week in a small blast-furnace by 
the use of coke from pit-coal. The parties 
who yet possessed plenty of wood, and with 
whom the production of iron was fast be- 
coming a monopoly, urged the charcoal 
burners to destroy the works of Dudley, 
which was done. Dudley's patent was 
granted for thirty-one years, which would 
bring it to 1650, the time of the Protector- 
ate, when England had a ruler fit to succeed 
Queen Bess. The celebrated statute of King 
James, limiting the duration of patents to 
fourteen years, was passed in 1624. Dud- 
ley's petition for an extension was refused. 

Iron of poor quality continued to be made 
in districts where wood Avas scarce, and of 
good quality from charcoal in places where 
forests yet remained. The demand for iron 
continuing to grow — a natural effect of ad- 
vancing civilization — iron was imported 
from Sweden and Russia in large quantities 
and of excellent quality. The forests of 
these countries gave them a natural ad- 
vantage over England, whose forests had 
by this time become thinned out, so that 
the use of wood for iron smelting had been 
forbidden by act of Parliament in 1581 
within twenty-two miles of the metropolis 
or fourteen miles of the Thames, and event- 
ually was prohibited altogether. 

The art of making iron with pit-coal and 
of casting articles of iron was revived by 
Abraham Darby, of Colebrookdale, about 
1713, and was perseveringly followed, al- 
though it was but little noised abroad. In 
the Philosophical Transactions for 1747 it is 
referred to as a curiosity. 

The extension of the iron manufacture 
dates from the introduction of the steam- 
engine, which increased the power of the 
blast, and the blowing engines, driven by 
manual, horse, or ox power, were henceforth 
operated by steam-engines. The dimension 
of the blast apparatus was increased from 
time to time, and about 1760 coke was com- 
monly used in smelting. In 1760 Smeaton 
erected at the Carron Works the first large 



70 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 




MODERN BLAST-FURNACE. 

blowing cylinders, and shortly after Boul- 
ton and Watt supplied the steam-engines 
by ■which the blowers were driven. Neil- 
son, of Glasgow, introduced the hot blast 
in 1828. Aubulos, in France, in 1811, and 
Budd, in England, in 1845, heated the blast 
by the escaping hot gases of the blast-fur- 
nace. In the smelting of iron four tons 
weight of gaseous products are thrown oft* 
into the air for each ton of iron produced. 

As a means of estimating by comparison 
the value of the hot blast, some facts may 
be mentioned. Mushet states that at the 
Clyde Iron-works, before the introduction 
of the hot blast, the quantity of materials 
necessary for the production of one ton of 
pig-iron was, 

Calcined ore 1% tons. 

Coke 3 " 

Limestone % ton. 

In 1831, when the system was coming into 

use, the blast being u-arm, 

Calcined ore 2 tons. 

Coke 2 " 

Limestone % ton. 

In L839, with a hot blast, 

Calcined ore 1% tons. 

Coke 1% " 

Limestone % ton. 

The saving in fuel being nearly one-half. 

In addition may be mentioned the fact 
that ant lira cite coal and black band ore are 
intractable under the cold blast, but the 
former yields an intense heat and the lat- 
ter a rich percentage of good iron with the 
hot bias' . 

The (alder Works in 1831 demonstrated 
the Heedlessness of coking when the hot 
blasi is employed. 



Experiments in smelting with anthracite 
coal were tried at Mauch Chunk in 1820, in 
France in 1827, and in Wales successfully by 
the aid of Neilson's hot-blast ovens in 1837. 
The experiment at Mauch Chunk was re- 
peated, with the addition of the hot blast, in 
1838-39, and succeeded in producing about 
two tons per day. The Pioneer furnace at 
Pottsville was blown-in July, 1839. 

The first iron-works in America were es- 
tablished near Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. 
In 1622, however, the works were destroyed 
and the workmen with their families massa- 
cred by the Indians. The next attempt was 
at Lynn, Massachusetts, on the banks of the 
Saugus, in 1648. The ore used was the bog 
ore, still plentiful in that locality. At these 
works Joseph Jenks, a native of Hammer- 
smith, England, in 1652, by order of the Prov- 
ince of Massachusetts Bay, coined silver 
shillings, sixpences, and threepences known 
as the " pine-tree coinage," from the device 
of a pine-tree on one face. The coinage of 
these pieces by Massachusetts excited the 
ire of the king, who, as Junius said to the 
Duke of Grafton, " left no distressing exam- 
ples of virtue even to [his] legitimate pos- 
terity." The king indignantly declared to 
Sir Thomas Temple that they had invaded 
his prerogative by coining money. Sir 
Thomas, who was a real friend to the colo- 
nies, took a piece out of his pocket and pre- 
sented it to the king. " One side was a pine- 
tree of that kind which is thick and bushy 
at the top. Charles asked what that was. 
' The royal oak, Sir, which preserved your 




I'UDIlI.IMO rUBNAOE. 



PUDDLING. 



71 




BANKS 8 MEOUANIOAL ITDIII.EIi. 



majesty's life !' The king resumed his good 
humor, calling the colonists a 'parcel of 
honest dogs.' " 

By dint of successive efforts, cast iron was 
produced in something like sufficient quan- 
tities to meet the demand, the furnaces en- 
larging as the blowing engines increased in 
power. 

The next step was to simplify and expe- 
dite the processes by which the cast iron was 
made malleable. In 1780, two years before 
the conclusion of the peace between Great 
Britain and the Federal government, Henry 
Cort invented the puddling furnace, which 
he patented in 1784, and which revolution- 
ized the business of making malleable iron. 
The charge of iron, say 540 pounds, is placed 
on a hearth in a reverberatory chamber 
whose bottom and sides are lined with re- 
fractory slags rich in oxide of iron. When 
the iron is melted, the slags rise through it 
and float on the top. The oxygen in the 
silicates combines with the carbon in the 
iron, decarbonizing it, the puddler stirring 



it vigorously to bring the carbon and other 
impurities of the iron in contact with the 
oxidizing flame. The iron granulates and 
throws off carbonic oxide, and eventually 
agglutinates, or, as the puddler says, " comes 
to nature." A deoxidizing flame is then 
used to protect the iron while it is being 
made into balls, which are shingled or 
squeezed to remove slag and compact it for 
rolling. The bed of Cort's furnace was of 
sand. Eogers, some years afterward, made 
the bottom of iron, and lined it with cinder. 

The operation of puddling is a great tax 
upon the strength and endurance of the 
men, both on account of the violent labor 
and of the exposure to the intense heat of 
the furnace. 

Mechanical puddlers have been substi- 
tuted for hand labor with some success. 
The rotating hearth of Danks, of Cincin- 
nati, has attained more celebrity in this 
country and in England than any other fur- 
nace for that purpose. The barrel-shaped 
chamber lined with refractory material is 




'////////////^///'/^^^^ 

EOLLING-MILL FOB IKON BAKB. 



72 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



placet! between the furnace and the chim- 
ney, and the iron, after it has become melt- 
ed, is rolled round and round as the chamber 
revolves, and thereby all parts are in turn 
exposed to the action of the flame. 

The ball from the puddling furnace is 
dragged or rolled to the steam or trip ham- 
mer or the squeezer, where it is compacted 
and has the dross driven out of it, making a 
bloom. In this condition it is shipped from 
some iron-works, while others carry it a step 
farther before putting it upon the market. 

Here occurred the next great necessity. 
Was the bar-iron always to be brought to 
shape by the hammer alone? Again Cort 
came to the rescue with the invention of 
the mill with grooved rollers, which he pat- 
ented in 1783. The yearly value of this im- 
provement in England and the United States 
amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars. 

Years after the death of the unrewarded 
Cort the rolling-mill was made to form 
plates for armor of ships of war. In 1842 
the late R. L. Stevens, of Hoboken, New 
Jersey, commenced the construction of an 
iron-clad Avar vessel under an agreement 
with the government, which has not yet 
been completed. In 1855 some armor-clad 
floating batteries were used by the French 
in the Black Sea. The La Gloire, launched 
in 1859, was plated with rolled iron of 4^ 
inches thickness, and was the first large 
iron-clad. The first English armored ves- 
sel, the Warrior, had the same thickness of 
armor. The thickness has since been much 
increased: the Bellerophon has 6 inches, the 
Hercules 9, Peter the Great (Russian) 12 to 14. 
The plating of the Monitor turret was 9 
inches, the WeehawJcen 11, laid on in sever- 
al thicknesses. Armor plating has been 
rolled in England of 15 inches thickness, 
carried by the Glatton turret. The turret 
of the Peter the Great is 16 inches — one 
thickness of 14 and one of 2 inches. 

While the capacity of the rolling-mill has 
seemed adequate to all calls, the business 
of the forge has also had its grand achieve- 
ments, resulting from the use of the steam- 
hammer. Tliis was invented by Nasmyth 
about 1838, and patented in 1842. It is 
true that there existed a description of 
Devereau's hammer in 1806 which recited 
the main features, but it seems to have 
excited no attention, and to have been fol- 




NASMYTH 8 DO0ULE-FHAME STEAM-HAMMER. 

lowed by no hammer. To Nasmyth we are 
indebted for it ; even he had to work against 
prejudice, which prevented its being used 
in England until after it had been tried in 
France by some more appreciative persons, 
whose attention had been in some way di- 
rected to it. 

The helve of the steam-hammer is the 
piston-rod of an overhead steam-engine, by 
which it is lifted. To drop it, the steam 
which lifted it is allowed to escape from 
below the piston, and the force of the blow 
is, in some hammers, increased by admitting 
the steam above the piston, which adds the 
force of the steam to that due to the weight 
and fall of the hammer. The sizes vary, 
having a very wide range, the weight of the 
hammer varying from 50 pounds to 80,000 
pounds, the stroke from six inches to six feet. 
They are single or double acting, have sin- 
gle or double frame, according to size, and all 
have a capacity for giving a blow of any re- 
quired fraction of their full power, and using 
any part of their range of stroke. The an- 
vils are made as heavy as 250 tons weight. 

The series of operations is here complete 
down to the point of shaping the metal while 
hot by rolling or by forging; but a great 
and hitherto unrealized improvement was 
sought by which the metal might be puri- 
fied by chemical means. Inventors in Eu- 
rope and America attacked the problem, but 
it was reserved for Bessemer to give it form, 
substance, and success. 

The process consists in placing a charge, 
say five tons, of molten iron in a vessel 
placed on trunnions, and known as a convert- 



THE BESSEMER PROCESS. 



73 



or, the bottom of the 
vessel having channels 
to admit in divided 
'streams a blast of air 
which passes through 
the melted metal, its 
oxygen entering into 
combination with the 
silicon, carbon, phos- 
phorus, sulphur, etc., 
forming gaseous com- 
pounds, which are lib- 
erated and driven up 
the chimney. The iron 
is melted in cupolas 
and tapped into the 
convertor, which is a 
pear - shaped vessel 
about fifteen feet high 
and nine feet diam- 
eter, hung upon trun- 
nions, to one of which 
the apparatus is at- 
tached which rotates 
the vessel in a vertical 
plane ; through the 
other trunnion passes 
an air-pipe which is 
continued down the 
outside of the vessel 
and opens into a chamber at the bottom 
which communicates with the main cham- 
ber through 120 holes, each three-eighths 
of an inch in diameter. These holes are 
in fire-bricks, and the vessel itself is lined 
with refractory material. 

The vessel is turned partly down, the 
mouth being presented upwardly to take its 
charge from a ladle suspended from a crane 
and sweeping in the arc of a circle between 
the cupola and the convertor. The blast is 
then turned on, the vessel righted, the ai>* 
pressure preventing the iron entering the 
blast holes, and the spout being presented to 
a canopy which leads the evolved gases up 
the chimney : this is shown at a b. The sil- 
icon of the pig-iron oxidizes first without 
very intense flame, but as the carbon begins 
to burn the heat rises to 5000° Fahrenheit, 
and the light is so brilliant as to cast shad- 
ows across sunshine. In fifteen or twenty 
minutes the marvelous illumination ceases 
more suddenly than it began, and this change 
in the flame indicates the critical moment 




BESSE.MEB PLANT. 



of the elimination of most of the carbon. 
The blast is stopped, the convertor turned 
on its side, and six hundred pounds of melt- 
ed spiegeleisen are turned in. The reaction 
is instantaneous and violent. The manga- 
nese of the spiegeleisen combines with any 
sulphur that may remain in the bath, form- 
ing compounds which pass into the slag. It 
also decomposes in the slag silicates of iron 
taking the place of the iron and returning 
it to the bath. Finally, the carbon and man- 
ganese together reduce the oxide of iron 
formed during blowing, and which would 
affect the malleability of the iron. This 
done, the monster, as if weary of swallow- 
ing boiling iron and snorting fire, turns its 
mouth downward and disposes of its con- 
tents into a kettle upon a turn-table. This 
act is shown at c d. The ladle on its turn- 
table e is then swung over the moulds /, 
ranged round the semicircular pit like a row 
of Ali Baba's wine jars, each capable of hold- 
ing a bandit. The glowing metal is drawn 
into the moulds from a tap hole in the ladle, 



74 



MECHANICAL PKOGRESS. 



and as each mould is filled the molten metal 
is covered with a steel plate and a packing 
of sand. When the ingots have solidified 
they arc tipped out of the moulds and car- 
ried away by tongs or traveling cranes to 
the shops, where they are hammered or 
rolled into the required forms of bars, rails, 
plates, and what not. The product is usu- 
ally a grade of steel, though the quality 
may bo varied by changes in the details of 
the process. 

Like Arkwright, Bessemer has become very 
wealthy, and for every dollar he has made, 
his country has been enriched by hundreds. 
The actual working process in America has 
been materially improved by Mr. Holly, who 
is consulting engineer of the principal Bes- 
semer works in this country. 

This was a great improvement for most 
purposes over the old process of cooking 
the iron in the puddling furnace to deprive 
it of its silicon and carbon, tilt-hammering 
the ball to a bloom, rolling the bloom to 
a bar, cutting the bar in pieces, and build- 
ing it with charcoal solidly into a cementa- 
tion furnace, where it might absorb carbon 
to constitute it steel. This old process is 
still pursued for the finer qualities, the blis- 
ter-steel produced from the cemented bar 
being several times worked before it be- 
comes the best cast steel for our finest cut- 
lery. The process of making cast steel was 
invented by Benjamin Huntsman, of Otter- 
clifF, near Sheffield, England, in 1770, so that 
this great invention comes practically with- 
in the century. The blister-steel is broken 
into pieces, fused in crucibles of refractory 
clay or graphite, made into ingots in cast- 
iron moulds, and then rolled. 

But the convenience of casting iron into 
shape, instead of laboriously forging it into 
the varied and sometimes difficult forms re- 
quired, is so great that a process for making 
cast-iron articles malleable became a great 
necessity. This was invented in Sheffield 
by Samuel Lucas, and patented by him in 
1804. The process is as follows : The cast- 
ings are inclosed in iron boxes, and sur- 
rounded with pounded iron-stone or some 
of the metallic oxides, as scales from the 
forge, common lime, or other absorbents of 
carbon, used either together or separately. 
The boxes are placed in the furnace, sub- 
jected to a strong heat for about five days, 



and allowed to cool gradually within the 
furnace. The time and other circumstances 
determine the depth of the effect. Thin 
pieces become malleable entirely through- 
out, admit of being readily bent, and may 
be slightly forged ; thicker pieces retain a 
central portion of cast iron, but in a soft- 
ened state, and not so brittle as at first. 
On sawing them through, the exterior coat 
of soft metal is perfectly distinguishable 
from the remainder. 

In the processes of hand forging, an- 
nealing, and tempering we have nothing 
to claim over the methods or the produc- 
tions of former ages and other nations, such 
as the Arabs and Persians. 

As with the processes involving the pro- 
duction and refining of iron, and the shaping 
of the heated metal by casting, forging, and 
rolling, so with the shaping of the cold met- 
al by turning and planing — all the important 
improvements are within the century. The 
lathes and boring-machines of the time pre- 
ceding Watt were rude and small affairs. 
The steam-cylinder invented by Papin about 
1690, and first used successfully by Newco- 
men and Galley in 1711, was so ill bored that 
its piston required to be covered with water 
to prevent leakage of air downward, and 
hence the Newcomen engines were always 
vertical. Watt's first engine, with a cylin- 
der eighteen inches in diameter, was built 
at Kinneal in 1770. In 1775 he entered 
on a partnership with Boulton, who took a 
two-thirds share in the patented engine, 
which worked with one-quarter the fuel 
used by the Newcomen engine performing 
similar work. Boulton was a man worthy 
of the occasion, and the works at Soho equal 
to the demand. 

The mature conceptions of these great 
mechanicians required a far finer style of 
execution of work, and a set of workmen 
arose who introduced exactness and system 
into the shop. Kamsden, about 1770, in- 
vented the micrometer-screw dividing-en- 
gine for graduating astronomical and sur- 
veying instruments, and reduced the error 
in ascertaining longitude by the Hadley 
quadrant to one-fiftieth. Bramah, in 1784, 
produced his lock, which was in its day a 
marvel of skill and finish; also the hydraulic 
press and the numbering machine for bank- 
notes and pages of account-books. Boulton 



LATHES AND PLANING-MACHINES. 



75 



and Watt, in 1788, were celebrated for the 
perfection of their mint apparatus, coining 
the silver of the Sierra Leone Company, the 
copper of the East India Company, and send- 
ing two complete mints to the Emperor Paul 
I. of Russia. In Bramah's workshop Clem- 
ent and perhaps Maudslay were trained, one 
the inventor of the planing -machine, the 
other a builder of marine engines, who gave 
them shape when as yet steam navigation 
was in its infancy. Roberts of Manchester 
gave his attention to the perfecting of ma- 
chinery for working in fibre, Whitworth es- 
pecially to machine-tools and instruments 
for measuring with mathematical accuracy. 
We shall have occasion to mention present- 
ly the perfecting of the modes of manufac- 
ture, and to show the part America took in 
the matter. 

The first turning-lathe was vertical — the 
potter's wheel — and was employed upon plas- 
tic material. After many centuries of use 
in this way, the spindle was made horizontal, 
and it was employed on wood. Its use on 
metal is comparatively modern. The screw- 
lathe is still more recent. One is described 
in a French work of 1578, and another in 
an English work of 1694. They were, how- 
ever, rather bench tools for watch-makers 
and jewelers than machines. The work of 
originating correct screws, and perfecting 
the screw-cutting lathe, was taken in hand 
by Plunder 1701, Ramsden 1770, Robinson 
of Soho 1790, Donkin, Allan, Roberts, Whit- 
worth, and others. The new era of the 
lathe commenced when the slide-rest was 
added. This was the invention of General 
Sir Samuel Bentham, about 1791. His par- 
ticular forte was in wood-working machin- 
ery, but the slide-rest once invented would 
be readily adapted to the metal lathe, and 
the slide-lathe soon followed. 

The application of a screw to the slide-lathe 
so as to render it capable of both sliding 
and screw-cutting was the next important 
improvement, and a great amount of time, 
perseverance, and capital was expended in 
endeavoring to perfect this portion of the 
lathe. 

After this the surfacing motion was intro- 
duced, and also the use of a shaft at the 
back of the lathe, in addition to the regular 
screw, for driving the sliding motion by 
rack and pinion, instead of both the mo- 



tions of sliding and screw - cutting being 
worked by the screw alone. 

Thus step by step improvements were 
gradually brought forward; the fore jaw and 
universal chucks and other important appli- 
ances were added so as to render the lathe 
applicable to a great variety of work, even 
cutting spiral grooves in shafts, scrolls in a 
face-plate, skew wheels, and also turning 
articles of oval, spherical, and other forms. 
Whitworth's duplex lathe, with one tool act- 
ing in front and the other behind the work, 
was invented for turning long shafts, cast- 
iron rollers, cylinders, and a great variety of 
work where a quantity of the same kind and 
dimensions has to be turned. 

The planing-machine was an outgrowth of 
the slide-lathe. Instead of the object turn- 
ing upon centres against a tool, it is dogged 
to a traversing - table and moves against 
the tool in a right line. This machine-tool 
has dispensed to a great extent with chip- 
ping and filing, and is at the bottom of all 
successful fitting of machinery. It is next 
in importance to the lathe. It was invent- 
ed about 1820, several excellent mechanics 
having about the same time worked at and 
solved the problem — Clements, who was a 
workman in Bramah's shop, Fox of Derby, 
Roberts and Rennie of Manchester. Bra- 
mah had, as far back as 1811, employed the 
revolving cutter to plane iron, adapting to 
metal the form previously used on wood- 
planing machines; this is the nulling-ma- 
chine lately so much improved and so de- 
servedly esteemed. 

The first planing -machines were moved 
by a chain winding on a drum ; the rack and 
pinion, and eventually the screw arrange- 
ment, were substituted. Clements's ma- 
chine, described in his letter to the " Society 
of Arts" (vol. xlix., p. 157 et seq.), included the 
reciprocating bed, guided and moved hori- 
zontally and automatically with a greater or 
lesser stroke. It had two cutters capable 
of being directed backward and forward, and 
at different elevations, so as to cut at each 
motion of the bed. The cutters were fixed 
in a sliding head, and were shifted automat- 
ically at the end of each stroke, horizontally 
or vertically. The cutters could be canted 
to any angle to plane either side of the work. 
It was, in fact, the planing-machine of the 
present day. 



76 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



The next great improvement in the ma- 
chine was the "Jim Crow" planer of Joseph 
Whitworth, of Manchester, 1835. This has 
the self- reversing cutter, which "wheeled 
ahout and turned ahout and did just so," 
operating both backward and forward with 
one tool without waste of time. 

Other adaptations known by special names 
can not be overlooked. The jack, a small ma- 
chine, named from its quick, handy ways 
and compact form. The slotting - machine 
and the key-grooving machine, by Roberts 
of Manchester, have mortise chisels recipro- 
cated vertically by an eccentric, while the 
wheel to be slotted is laid horizontally on 
the lathe and fed toward the cutter between 
each stroke. The milling-machme has been 
referred to. It is only of late that it has 
been esteemed as it deserves and made much 
use of. The s/irtpn^-niachine is one in which 
the object is chucked on a mandrel, the tool 
traverses above the work in a line parallel 
with the axis of the mandrel ; the latter be- 
ing slightly rotated between each stroke 
constitutes the feed, and the result is a cir- 
cular or curved shape attained by straight 
cuts. 

The machine-tools of the present day are 
a marvel, and the work turned out by them 
excels in quality and quantity any thing 
conceivable by the worthies of the first part 
of the present century. Watt, for instance 
— to select the most prominent of the men 
who combined to revolutionize the world of 
industry while smaller men were making all 
the noise in the manufacture of " holy alli- 
ances" which hardly survived their framers 
— Watt would have been infinitely gratified 
and astonished at the development and per- 
fection of the machine-tools of the present 
day. He would see in them the cause and 
the effect; the ponderous and yet delicate 
machines driven by the engines which they 
had created ; the tools the makers and yet 
the agents ; the engines the movers of the 
tools by which they came to exist; their 
growth parallel in fitness, proportion, and 
magnitude, which are the elements of beau- 
ty, grace, and majesty. 

A word as to the constitution of the ma- 
chines themselves, of the means by which 
they are fashioned and adapted to perform 
their specific duties with smoothness, direct- 
ness, and economy of power. 



The system of making the component 
parts of a machine or implement in distinct 
pieces of fixed shape and dimensions, so that 
corresponding parts are interchangeable, is 
known as assembling. The term is, howev- 
er, more strictly applicable to their fitting 
together after being separately and accu- 
rately made according to fixed patterns, 
and constantly compared by gauges and 
templates which test the dimensions. 

This system of interchangeability of parts 
was first introduced into the French artil- 
lery service by General Gribeauval, about 
1765. He reduced the gun - carnages to 
classes, and so arranged many of the parts 
that they could be applied indiscriminately 
to any carriage of the class for which they 
were made. The system was afterward ex- 
tended into several of the European serv- 
ices and into that of the United States. 

The first fire-arm attempted to be made 
on this system was the breech-loader of 
John H. Hall, of North Yarmouth, Massa- 
chusetts, 1811, of which 10,000 were made 
for the United States, $10,000 being voted 
the inventor in 1836, being at the rate of one 
dollar per gun. Some of them were cap- 
tured in Fort Donelson, February 16, 1862. 
They were probably the first breech-loading 
military arms ever issued to troops. 

The extent to which the system of gauges 
was actually carried with the Hall arm is 
not accurately known, but it is doubtless 
true that the principle was first brought to 
a high state of system and accuracy by Col- 
onel Colt, of Connecticut, in the manufac- 
ture of his pistols. Among the most impor- 
tant of the extensions of the principle has 
been the making of special machines to 
fashion particular parts, or even special 
portions of individual pieces, so that each 
separate part may be shaped by successive 
machines, and bored by others, issuing in 
the exact form required. 

This plan requires large capital, and will 
not pay unless a great number of similar 
articles be required, but has been extensive- 
ly introduced into this country, and from 
hence into England, and to some extent on 
to the continent of Europe. All the gov- 
ernment breech-loading fire-arms are thus 
made. The greater number of the military 
arms of Europe and Egypt are thus made in 
the United States for the various countries. 



BANK-NOTE ENGRAVING. 



77 



The Snider gun, a modification of an Ameri- 
can model, is made at the Enfield Arsenal, 
England, on special machines made for that 
purpose in duplicate at the Colt Works, 
Hartford, Connecticut. Pratt and Whitney, 
of Hartford, are just completing for Germany 
a full set of special machines and gauges for 
the manufacture of the Mauser rifle, adopt- 
ed by Prussia for the confederate German 
States. 

The first watch made on this plan was 
the " American" watch of Waltham, Massa- 
chusetts, the system extending down to the 
almost microscopic screws and other small 
parts. All the prominent sewing-machines 
are so made ; the same with Lamb's knit- 
ting-machine, and probably others. Many 
kinds of agricultural implements, including 
plows, harvesters, threshers, and wagons, 
are made of interchangeable parts. The 
system has been carried into locomotive 
building ; about seven grades of engines, it 
is understood, are employed on the Penn- 
sylvania Central Railroad, corresponding 
parts of a given grade being precisely simi- 
lar, so as to fit any engine of the class. 
This is the American system of assembling. 

While upon the subject of instruments 
of precision, one or two instances may be 
given where the result was a marked suc- 
cess and affected large interests. 

The American system of bank-note en- 
graving is the invention of Jacob Perkins, 
of Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1837. 
Previous to his time the engraving, whether 
of ornament or lettering, had been simply 
cut by hand upon the plate, which was then 
printed in the copper-plate press. Perkins's 
system is to engrave the design on separate 
blocks of softened steel, which are subse- 
quently hardened. Each block so engraved 
is used to make a raised impression on a 
softened steel roller, which is rocked upon 
it under very heavy pressure. The roller is 
then hardened, and is used as a roller die to 
impress the steel plate from which the notes 
are printed. Each part of the face and 
back of the note is upon one or another of 
the roller dies, whose separate impressions 
upon the plate combine to make up the 
whole design, roller after roller being used 
after adjustment to its proper place over the 
plate. The table is provided with complete 
adjustments of peculiar delicacy. 




PERKINS 8 TRANSFERRING PRE8B AND ROLLER DIE. 

The invention was introduced into En- 
gland by Perkins, but did not become pop- 
ular. In Ireland it fared better. In this 
country it is supreme. 

Postal and revenue stamps are so made in 
all instances. England makes them for the 
varied and widely separated nations of her 
vast empire. America, which originated 
the system, makes them for other nations 
in all quarters of the globe. The postal 
stamp itself, though now a necessity, is an 
affair but of yesterday, as it were, and was 
an outgrowth of cheap postage, for which 
let us thank Divine Providence and Row- 
land Hill. 

Another triumph of the century is the 
watch. The invention of the compensation- 
balance of John Harrison covered the period 
1728-1761. He died in 1776. Arnold and 
Earnshaw brought it to something near 
perfection. Harrison's fourth chronometer 
was sent in a man-of-war to Jamaica, which 
it reached five seconds slow. On the return 
to Portsmouth, after a five-months' voyage, 
it was one minute and five seconds wrong, 
showing an error of sixteen miles of lon- 
gitude, and within the limit of the act of 
Parliament of Queen Anne, passed in 1714. 
This amount of accuracy has since been 
very much exceeded. He received the 
grant of £20,000 in installments, the reward 
of forty years' diligence. 

The American system of watch-making, 
by gathering all the operations under one 
roof, making the parts as largely as possi- 
ble by machinery, each part being made in 
quantity by gauge and pattern, and the 



78 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 




THE GREAT EQUATORIAL — UNITED STATES NAVAL OBSERVATORY 

pieces afterward assembled, dates back to 
1852, but was afterward perfected, arid the 
number of parts reduced from 800 to 156. 
In the year mentioned A. L. Denison and 
three coadjutors started the business in 
Roxbury, Massachusetts, thence moved to 
Waltham, Massachusetts, where the busi- 
ness now occupies a large factory, employs 
700 hands, and turns out 80,000 watches 
annually. This is the pioneer establish- 
ment. Others are in operation at Elgin, 
Illinois; Springfield, Massachusetts; New- 
ark and Marion, New Jersey. 

Achromatic lenses were first made by John 
Dollond, of London, 1758. The discovery 
rendered the telescope of high powers possi- 
ble. Without going into the optical prin- 
ciples involved, it may be stated that with 
refracting telescopes before Dollond an in- 
strument of quite moderate magnifying pow- 
er was 100 feet long. The equatorial of the 



Washington Observa- 
tory is the largest re- 
fractor in the world. 
It was made by Alvan 
Clark and Sons, of 
Cambridgeport, Mas- 
sachusetts, the glass 
being cast by Chauce 
and Co., of Birming- 
ham, England. It was 
mounted in Novem- 
ber, 1873, is thirty- 
two feet long, and, 
last and most impor- 
tant of the statement, 
it has an objective of 
twenty-six inches di- 
ameter. 

With two other in- 
struments of precision 
we may close this part 
of the subject, both 
means for accurate 
measurement : 

1. The contact level 
invented by Repsold^ 
of Hamburg, in 1820, 
as improved by Wiir- 
demann, of Washing- 
ton. It is an adapta- 
tion of the spirit-lev- 
el, for the production 
of exact divisions of 
scales, and for the determination of very 
minute divisions of length. It consists of 
a delicate level pivoted at its middle and 
across its length with a small tilt-weight 
at one end, which tips always in one direc- 
tion. From the centre of the level down- 
ward extends a short rigid arm, with a 
plain polished surface perpendicular to the 
chord of the level against which the con- 
tact is made. The carrier of this instru- 
ment is either fixed or mounted in a slide 
governed by a micrometer screw. If, now, 
the end of a rod terminating in a hardened 
steel point be advanced horizontally till it 
hears against the contact arm, the level will 
gradually assume the horizontal position, 
and the movement of the bubble, as indi- 
cated by the scale upon the glass, will de- 
pend upon the relation of the radius to 
which the level tube is ground and the 
length of the contact lever. If the latter 



INSTRUMENTS OF PRECISION. 



79 



be half an inch long, and the radius of the 
glass tube he 400 feet (levels for astronom- 
ical purposes are ground to a sweep of 800 
and 1000 feet radius), the relation between 
the lever and radius is as 1 to 9600, and as 
J^ of an inch can be readily read from the 
lever scale, ^aifooo of an inch (9600X50) will 
be the difference in length which each such 
division on a scale indicates. 

2. Whitworth's micrometer gauge is ca- 



pable of measuring to 



rSnnTT of an inch. 



The principle of its action may be readily 
understood by the micrometer screw D, 
which is a pocket instrument made to meas- 
ure to fjfeo of an inch. The screw has fifty 
threads to an inch, the head having twenty 
divisions on its circumference ; consequent- 
ly a turn of the head through one division 
advances the screw J^ X s 1 o = io 1 oo OI " an mcn - 

The millionth measuring instrument, 
shown by three views, A, B, C, has two 
head-stocks with a V groove between them, 
in which the square bars b c are laid, as is 
also the standard of the bar d, of which 
the length is to be tested. The sides of the 
groove and of the bars are worked up to as 
true a plane as possible, and are kept at 
right angles to each other. The ends of 
the bars are also made square with their 
sides, and brought to true planes, the ends 
being canted to present circular instead of 
square faces. Through each head-stock runs 
an accurately pitched micrometer screw, by 
which b and c are driven along the groove. 
The screw on the side of b has exactly twen- 
ty threads to the inch, and is turned by the 
wheel /, the circumference of which is di- 
vided into 250 parts. Consequently, by 
turning the wheel forward one division the 
bar is moved g^o o °f an inch. 

The other screw has a similar thread, is 
driven by a worm-wheel of 200 teeth, into 
which gears a tangent screw h, having 
fixed upon its stem the graduated wheel g. 
The circumference of this wheel being 
also divided into 250 parts, a movement of 
one division corresponds to a traverse of 

20 x so o x 53o =Too5o oo of an iiQcl1 °n the 
bar c. Fixed pointers enable the exact 
movement of wheels / or g to be read off, 
so that this extremely minute difference in 
the length of any bars may be detected, 
provided the micrometer screws exert an 
equal pressure in every case. 




whitworth's millionth measuring gauge. 

This equality of pressure is secured by 
a very simple and beautiful arrangement. 
Between one extremity of the steel bar un- 
der comparison and the sliding bar a small 
steel piece with true parallel sides is intro- 
duced. This piece is called the feeler, and 
its ends, e e, rest upon two supports on the 
sides of the bed. When little or no pressure 
is exerted on the bar d, the feeler falls back 
of its own weight if one of its ends is raised. 
A slight pressure prevents this falling back, 
and the friction between this piece and the 
ends of the bars becomes a very delicate 
measure of the pressure to which it is sub- 
jected. 

ENGINEERING. 

How shall we condense within the limits 
of the section of an article even a list of the 
engineering devices and expedients which 
distinguish the century nearly closed from 
any which has preceded it ? The pyramids, 
temples, and obelisks of Egypt, the graceful 
architecture of Greece and of the Freema- 
sons of the Middle Ages, the Roman roads 
and aqueducts, make the fame of the past. 
The present has a new set of devices, and 
its modes and structures are utterly beyond 
the conceptions of ancient times. 

We will pass over the works which differ 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



in no essential respect from those of the past. 
Quays, sea-walls, and breakwaters were fa- 
miliar to the Mediterranean nations, and 
our canals differ from those of the ancients 
only in having locks — not a small advance, 
by-the-way, and one for which we are in- 
debted to the Italian engineers, the brothers 
Domenico. The canal of Sesostris — re-open- 
ed by Pharaoh Necho about 605 B.C., again 
by Ptolemy Philadelphia 300 B.C., once again 
by the Caliphs, and abandoned when Vasco 
da Gama circumnavigated the Cape of Good 
Hope — conducted the water of the Red Sea 
to the Nile near Belbeys, the Bubastis Agria 
of the Romans. It was ninety-six miles 
long. The track of the present Suez Canal 
only follows the former course to the Bitter 
Lakes, and then passes to Port Said on the 
Mediterranean. The sand and earth of the 
old canal were drearily excavated by fellahs 
who toiled with wooden shovels and bas- 
kets. The steam-dredges of M. De Lesseps 
were sixty in number, of two kiuds, and de- 
posited the 400,000,000 cubic yards of mud 
and sand on banks at a regulated distance 
from the canal. 

The Pharos of Alexandria, said to have 
been 450 feet high, was a beacon to the road- 
stead of Alexandria. This city was built 
by what might have seemed the whim of 
a man who in the pleuitude of his power 
came to Rhacotis, a place occupied by a lit- 
tle group of hovels, and spread his Macedo- 
nian cloak on the ground for the plan of a 
city to bear his name. He saw it rise in 
his mind's eye, and gave his directions for 
the avenues, the Serapseum, the Bruchion, 
and other public buildings, took up his line 
of march for the teeming East, and never 
saw Alexandria. Yet posterity approved 
his judgment, and his city has embalmed 
his name. 

One of our contributions in the line of 
light-houses is the dovetailed block system 
introduced by Smeaton in 1760 at the Ed- 
dystone, copied by the Stephensons at Bell 
Rock, in the Frith of Forth, and at the 
Skerryvores, and still later at Wolf Islaud. 
Others are the screw-pile and the truss- 
frame systems, which are convenient in 
many places where the column of mason- 
ry is not suitable. Farther, the mode of 
lighting is much more eminently superior to 
the past than is the mere structure. When 



Smeaton had finished the Eddystone it was 
lighted by twenty-four tallow-candles stuck 
in a hoop. Even the Tour de Corduan, put 
up with so much expense in 1610 at the 
mouth of the Garonne, was for a long time 
lighted with burning logs in a largo cres- 
set. The catoptric system of lamps with 
parabolic reflectors was introduced into the 
Tour de Corduan soon after the invention 
of the circular- wick and centre -draught 
lamp by Argand, of Geneva, in 1784 — a lamp 
which made the effective illumination of 
light-houses possible. 

The dioptric system, by lenses, was at- 
tempted in England at the South Foreland 
light in 1752 and the Portland light in 1759, 
but failed for want of skill. It was revived 
and improved by Fresnel in 1810. It was 
adopted in the Lundy Island light in 1834, 
and is the best light, having several grades 
of size, according to importance of posi- 
tion. 

In pile-driving we have better machin- 
ery than the Romans, who, however, made 
good work in bridges built on piles, and in 
constructing coffer-dams for building stone 
piers in river-beds. Elm piles driven by 
the Romans at London were in good order 
when removed to build the abutments of 
London Bridge in 1829. Caesar threw a pile 
and trestle bridge across the Rhine in ten 
days. Trajan's bridge across the Danube 
was 4770 feet long, having twenty semicir- 
cular arches of 180 feet 5 inches span each. 
The piers were of stone, the superstructure 
wood. There were also many bridges in 
Rome. 

For working beneath the surface of the 
water we, however, have several methods 
unknown to the ancients, and, indeed, only 
used to valuable purpose within the centu- 
ry. The first use of the diving-bell in en- 
gineering was by Smeaton in 1779. It had 
been used for a century or two as a curios- 
ity or in reclaiming sunken treasures, and 
had been much improved by Halley and by 
Spalding in 1774, before it came into Smea- 
ton's hands. 

The pneumatic caisson, which now forms 
so important an aid in sinking piers to sol- 
id foundations beneath river-beds, is the 
invention of M. Triger, of France, where it 
was first used in sinking a shaft for a coal- 
pit through a stratum of quicksand, to reach 



BRIDGE-BUILDING. 



81 



the coal-measures in the vicinity of 
the river Loire, in France. It con- 
sisted of a tube made in sections, so as 
to be extended as the shaft deepened. 
The lower end was open, and divided 
by a floor with a tightly fitting trap- 
door from a middle chamber, the ceil- 
ing of which had a similar door. By 
means of an air-compressiug pump the 
water was kept out of the lower 
chamber, where the men worked, and 
the buckets were handed up through 
the floors to the top, the middle cham- 
ber forming an air-lock, which was al- 
ternately in communication with the 
working-chamber below and with the 
air-chamber above it. 

The figure shows a caisson used 
some years afterward in building the 
piers of a bridge at Copenhagen, Den- 
mark. A much improved and ex- 
tended plan was adopted by Captain 
James B. Eads in building the river 
piers of the Illinois and St. Louis Rail- 
way Bridge across the Mississippi ; 
and by Colonel W. A. Roebling for the 
piers of the suspension-bridge across 
the East River, New York. In each 
of the last-mentioned cases the cais- 
son is a very heavy structure, de- 
signed when it reached the solid rock 
to remain there, be built up full of 
masonry or concrete, and then sup- 
port the pier which was built upon it 
as it descended ; the Triger caisson, 
after its function as a pneumatic ex- 
cavating chamber was completed, formed a 
lining for the shaft in a treacherous soil ; the 
Copenhagen caisson was lifted as the pier 
built at the bottom progressed upwardly. 




CAISSON AT <:<>!'KNI1AGEN. 



The next illustration shows an East River 
caisson. The mode adopted for getting rid 
of the excavated material in the New York 
caisson is the invention of M. Fleur St. Denis, 




CAISSON OF THE EAST RIVER BRIDGE, NEW YORK. 



82 



MECHANICAL PEOGRESS. 




FLOATING DEBlilOK, DEPARTMENT OF FUBLIO I>OOKS, NEW YORK, 



chief engineer des Chemins de Fer de l'Est, 
in France. It consists of a water -shaft 
whose lower end is submerged in water in 
a basin, and which is traversed by a dredg- 
ing bucket or grapple, according as mud or 
rock has to be raised. The condensed air 
in the other part of the interior of the cais- 
son keeps water excluded, and makes it hab- 
itable for the workmen. 

In the St. Louis caisson the sand, mud, 
and stones as large as a hickory-nut were 
driven out of the collecting basin in the 
floor of the working chamber by means of 
a powerful jet of air which lifted a column 
of water in a tube, and with it the finer 
excavated material, the pipe discharging it 
over the side into a lighter. 

The docks of some principal sea-ports are 
a marvelous feature both in character and 
in extent. London and Liverpool are cele- 
brated for tidal docks. The first named had 
a particular object in grouping the mer- 



chantmen of special trades togeth- 
er in basins where the access be- 
tween vessels and warehouses 
might be free, and within walls 
which were guarded by the cus- 
tom-house authorities. It was also 
desirable to produce more wharf 
room. The high tides of the 
Mersey render the port of Liver- 
pool very inconvenient for river 
and lighter work, and make tidal 
basins a necessity. The quays of 
Montreal are the best in America. 

The large floating derrick of the 
New York Department of Public 
Docks picks up a block of 100 tons, 
is towed to the place of deposit, 
and then lowers the block into the 
position it is to occupy in the new 
river wall. 

The dry-docks of the principal 
naval stations of the world are 
a great engineering success, and 
would have vastly astonished 
Archimedes, who had no resource 
but a bank of earth to embay his 
vessel, and then pump out the 
pond. 

The floating dock Bermuda is an 
iron vessel of a rectangular shape, 
with a rounded bow and a strong 
caisson -gate at the stern. The 
vessel has a double skin, with a large in- 
tervening space. Into the inner basin a 
ship is floated while the dock is partially 
submerged ; the caisson being closed, the 
water in the dock and space intervening 
between the two skins is pumped out so 
that the interior may be dry to allow work 
on the vessel, and the jacket may have suf- 
ficient flotative power to carry its load. 

The Bermuda was built in England, and 
was towed to Bermuda by war vessels. 
This dock cost $1,250,000, and has the fol- 
lowing dimensions : extreme length, 381 
feet ; width inside, 83 feet 9 inches ; depth, 
74 feet 5 inches. The weight is 8350 tons. 
The dock is U-shaped, and the section 
throughout is similar. It is built with two 
skins fore and aft at a distance of twenty 
feet apart. The space between the skins is 
divided by a water-tight bulk-head, running 
with the middle line the entire length of 
the dock, each half being divided into three 



FLOATING DOCKS. 



83 




.IJA. 




FLOATING DOCK " BERMUDA. 



chambers by like bulk-heads. The three 
chambers are respectively named "load," 
"balance," and "air" compartments. The 
first-named chamber is pumped full in eight 
hours when a ship is about to be docked, 
and the dock is thus sunk below the level 
of the horizontal bulk-heads which divide 
the other two chambers. Water sufficient 
to sink the structure low enough to per- 
mit a vessel to enter is forced into the bal- 
ance chambers by means of valves in the 
external skin. The vessel having floated 
in, the next operation is to place and se- 
cure the end caissons, which act as gates. 
When the water is ejected from the "load" 
chamber, the dock with the vessel in it rises, 
the water in the dock being allowed to de- 
crease by opening the sluices in the cais- 
sons. The dock is trimmed by letting the 
water out of the "balance" chamber into 
the structure itself. The inside of the dock 
is cleared of water by valves in the skin, and 
it is left to dry. When it becomes neces- 
sary to undock the vessel the valves in the 
external skins of the " balance" chamber 
are opened in order to fill them, and the 
culverts in the caissons are also opened, and 
the dock sunk to a given depth. From keel 
to gunwale nine main water-tight ribs ex- 
tend, further dividing the distance between 
the two skins into eight compartments ; 
thus there are altogether forty-eight water- 



tight divisions. Frames made of strong 
plates and angle-iron strengthen the skins 
between the main ribs. Four steam en- 
gines and pumps on each side — each pump 
has two suctions, emptying a division of an 
" air" chamber — are fitted to the dock, and 
these also fill a division of the " load" cham- 
ber. When it becomes necessary to clean, 
paint, or repair the bottom of the dock, it 
is careened by the weight of water in the 
" load" chambers of one side, and the middle 
Line is raised about five feet out of water. 
The Royal Alfred, bearing the flag of the 
admiral on the station, and weighing 6000 
tons, was lifted by this dock, her keel rest- 
ing on a central line of blocks arranged on 
the floor of the dock, the ship being shored 
up with timbers all around the top-sides. 

Steam-pumps are important among the 
engineering devices of the day. The neces- 
sity of pumping water from mines, from 
ponds in draining, or from sunken vessels, 
coffer-dams, or wet excavations, has given 
great importance to that special application 
of the steam-engine. 

The Cornish engine has already been re- 
ferred to, but there is a host of machines 
for use on shipboard, for wrecking, at rail- 
way watering stations, and used by manu- 
facturers who require water in large quan- 
tity. 

Perronet was the greatest engineer of his 



84 



MECHANICAL, PROGRESS. 




PERRONET's OHAPELETS (CHAIN • PUMPS) AT ORLEANS, 
FRANCE. 



time, the builder of the famous bridge of 
Neuilly, and many other structures in France, 
the finest of their day, some of which yet re- 
main witnesses to his skill and perfect taste. 
It is understood that his masterpiece, the 
bridge of Neuilly, was partially destroyed by 
the French during the German invasion, to 
render it impassable to the enemy. This 
was the first level bridge. The Waterloo 
Bridge, by Rennie, is even a more magnifi- 
cent example. This is men- 
tioned to introduce the fact 
that the chief engineer of the 
ponts et chaussees in the reign of 
Louis XVI. had no better con- 
trivance for pumping out his 
coffer-dams than a chain-pump 
— the old noria, the na ura of 
the Arabs, "the wheel broken 
at the cistern" of Eccles., xii. 6. 
Better made, it is true, but 
the same otherwise. Perronet's 
chapelets (d) — so called because 
the buckets were strung along 
on a band like the beads of a 
rosary — were worked by horse- 



power at Orleans, twelve at a time being 
employed, making 140 revolutions per hour. 
The pallets acted as buckets, and passed at 
the rate of 9600 per hour, e and/ are views 
of another chapelet of Perronet, driven by a 
water-wheel in the stream outside the coffer- 
dam. The current water-wheels used for 
raising water for the city of London, 1731, 
were under the arches of London Bridge, and 
gave way to the Boulton and Watt engine. 

For drainage purposes with moderate lifts 
we have much improved lately, and princi- 
pally since 1840, about which time the cen- 
trifugal pump came into notice, the first 
form being an inversion of the turbine, the 
wheel being driven by steam to raise the 
water in the vertical chute. 

In the fens of Lincolnshire for low lifts the 
scoop-wheel is much employed. At Haar- 
lem Lake, Holland, are the largest punip- 
ing-engines in the world, perhaps. They 
are three in number, have annular cylinders 
of twelve feet diameter, with inner cylinders 
of seven feet diameter. One engine works 
eleven pumps, and the others eight each. 
Each engine lifts sixty-six tons of water per 
stroke to a height of ten feet ; when pressed 
each lifts 109 tons per stroke to that height. 
Running economically, each lifts 75,000,000 
pounds of water one foot high for ninety-four 
pounds of Welsh coal. The net effective 
force of each is 350 horses ; the consumption 
of fuel is two and a quarter pounds per 
horse-power per hour. The surface drained 
by the three engines is 45,230 acres, an aver- 
age lift of the water, depending on the state 
of the tides, being sixteen feet. All other 
drainage enterprises sink into insignificance 




CURRENT WATEB-WnEEL, LONDON I!RIT>OE, 1731. 



ENGINES FOR TUNNELING. 



85 



beside those of Holland. They include an 
area of 223,062 acres drained by mechanical 
means. 

Prominent among the engineering enter- 
prises of the day are the tunneling of mount- 
ain chains and the removal, by drilling and 
blasting, of submarine obstructions. 

It is just about 250 years since gunpow- 
der was first used in blasting by the Ger- 
man miners in Hungary ; now it seems 
strange that any great enterprise in rock 
should be attempted without it. The pa- 
tient labor of the men who chiseled their 
way through a mile of rock near Vicovaro 
in making the second Roman aqueduct, the 
Anio Vetus, is rather sad than exhilarating 
when we consider the unpaid labor of the 
poor slaves who hewed out the tunnel. 

Two vast jobs of tunneling ranges of 
mountains have lately been completed — the 
Mont Cenis and the Hoosac tunnels. An- 
other, larger one is in progress — the St. 
Gothard. In each case the work was done, 
or is being done, by drills operated by com- 
pressed-air engines, the escaping air at the 
workings being an element of great value, 
as it provides fresh air at that point and 
establishes an outward current. 

This whole business of exhausting air, 
compressing air, and using the comparative 
vacuum or the positive pressure, is very new. 
It is true, Otto Guericke had an air-pump in 
1650, and Samuel Pepys says, February 15, 
1665, of his visit to the Royal Society at 
Gresham College, " It is a most acceptable 
thing to hear their discourse and to see their 
experiments ; which were this day on fire, 
and how it goes out in a place where the ayre 
is not free, and sooner out where the ayre is 
exhausted, which they showed by an engine 
on purpose." 

These were but chamber experiments, and 
air used in an engine can not probably be 
traced back of Glazebrook's English patent 
of 1797, which had the principal features of 
the modern approved forms. Stirling's en- 
gine, 1827, was used at the Dundee Foundry, 
Scotland, for some years. Medhurst patent- 
ed in 1799 the device of condensing air to be 
used at the workings into reservoirs at the 
bottom of the shaft by engines at the sur- 
face. Bompas had an air-driven carriage in 
1828. The rock-drills at the Bardonneche 
end of the Mont Cenis tunnel were driven by 



air compressed by a curious apparatus de- 
vised by Sommeilleur, the volume of air com- 
pressed daily being 826,020 cubic feet, giving 
137,670 feet at the drills under a pressure 
of six atmospheres. Air-pumps condensed 
the air at the French end of the tunnel. 

Air, steam, and gunpowder are working 
hand in hand through the mountains and 
under the water. Now 18,500 pounds of 
gunpowder in three charges, simultaneous- 
ly fired, tear at one crash 400,000 tons of 
chalk from the face of Round Down Cliff, 
near Dover ; now twenty-three tons of pow- 
der in kegs heave the roof from the previous- 
ly excavated cavern 50 by 140 feet beneath 
the Blossom Rock in the harbor of San 
Francisco. Jumper drills have long been 
pegging away at the works in the East 
River, where dangerous rocks and reefs are 
being removed to a safe depth, or cut away 
to improve the approaches or prevent dan- 
gerous currents and eddies. The works at 
Hallett's Point are among the most impor- 




UEADINU OF THE EXCAVATION, HALLETT's POINT EEEF, 
EAST EIVEB, NEW YORK. 

tant of these, and here the headings are 
driven radiating like the sticks of a fan, 
and are joined by cross galleries which 
leave square pillars to support the rock 
ceiling on which the sea beats. The gal- 
leries are numbered, and embouch into a 
common area (a), whence the excavated ma- 
terial is lifted by cranes ; c is the shore line. 
The roof will come off some day with a bang, 
and the fragments will fall into the pit, and 
may be removed thence by grappling. 

Closely allied to this work is that of bor- 
ing Artesian and oil wells. These also 
seem to belong to us of "the latter days," 
although it has always been the case that 
wells dug in some strata become Artesian. 
If the source of supply be high enough, they 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 






IRON ARCH BRIDGES. 



eras Station of the Midland Counties 
Railway, England, are eminent in- 
stances. The former was constructed 
by Buckhout, and is 652 feet long, 199 
feet 2 inches between walls. It covers 
about three acres. The St. Pancras Sta- 
tion has a span of 240 feet, a length of 
690 feet, covering five platforms, ten 
lines of rails, and a cab stand twenty- 
five feet wide. 

The use of iron in structures marks 
the work of the century. Engineers 
have in their adaptation of the new ma- 
terial contrived a new set of forms and 
parts, and made an entirely new set of 
calculations. The genius and skill Avere 
not wanting before, we may say, but the 
previous century had not the iron in 
quantity. 

Bridge-building affords a remarkable 
group of structures in iron. There are 



a is a representation of the cast-iron arch bridge of 600 
feet span projected by Telford for crossing the Thames. 
b was a bridge of cast-iron sections, 500 feet span, proposed four forms, the arch, truss, suspension, 
by Telford for the Menai Straits in preference to the suspen- tubular. The projects become more and 
sion-bridge of 570 feet span decided upon by the commit- 
tee, c, the middle arch of Southwark Bridge, 240 feet span, more bold. 

The first iron bridge was one of cast- 



run over, as at Artois, from whence they are 
named. 

If the Chinese of the province On-Tong- 
Kias did really bore the flowing wells to a 
depth of from 1500 to 1800 feet, we must 
admit that we have but few to exceed that 
depth. London's Trafalgar Square wells are 
only 393 feet ; they soon reach water seams 
in the chalk. The well at Calais, France, 
is 1138 feet ; Donchery, Ardennes, 1215 feet ; 
Grenelle, 1802; Passy, 1913; brine well at 
Kissingen, 2000 ; Belcher's sugar refinery, 
St. Louis, 2197. The Columbus, Ohio, 2700 
feet, and St. Louis County Farm, 3235 feet, 
are failures as Artesian wells. 

Iron has entered largely into modern struc- 
tures, and the time seems near at hand when 
important buildings will be made of brick, 
iron, and cement. Sir Joseph Paxton made 
a long step ahead in 1851, when he construct- 
ed of iron the building to which England 
invited the representatives of all nations. 
The constructors of iron houses in our cities 
must abandon the attempt to imitate in iron 
the shapes which are proper to such mate- 
rials as brick and stone. 

The great success, so far, is in roofs. Those 
of the Grand Central Railway De"p6t, Forty- 
second Street, New York, and the St. Pan- 



iron sections across the Severn at Colebrook- 
dale, in England, erected in 1779 by Darby 
and Wilkinson, unless we may mention a 
foot chain-bridge seventy feet long across 
the Tees in 1741, and credit the chain-bridge 
in a mountain pass at King-tong, in China. 
In 1796 Wilson erected an iron arch bridge 
100 feet above the water over the Wear at 
Sunderland. In 1818-25 Telford spanned 
the Menai Straits by his so-called chain- 
bridge. Iron rods with coupling links form 
the catenary. Southwark Bridge (c) over 
the Thames is or was a structure of three 
arches of cast-iron voussoirs, and was erect- 
ed in 1819. 

The highest bridge in the world is the 
Verrugas Viaduct, on the Lima and Oroya 
Railway, in the Andes of Peru. It is 12,000 
feet above the level of the sea, 575 feet 
long, and formed of three iron truss spans 
on iron piers. 

The bridge lately built across the Missis- 
sippi at St. Louis has a compound system 
of steel tubular arches supporting the truss 
and road-beds. It has three spans of 497, 
515, and 497 feet respectively. The middle 
arch has but one fellow in the world, that 
of Kuilinburg, in Holland. Its engineer is 
Captain Eads, and it has lately been opened 



SUSPENSION-BRIDGES. 



87 



amidst great rejoicing. It has a double- 
track railway upon the lower level, and a 
roadway thirty -four feet wide and two 
footways each eight feet wide upon the 
upper level. The Illinois roads which con- 
verge upon this viaduct have freight de"- 
pdts near the water, but the passenger 
trains pass through a tunnel 4800 feet in 
length beneath the river-side part of the 
city, and reach the up-town dep6t. Each 
span consists of four arches, having two 
members each, an upper and a lower one. 
Each member is of two parallel cast-steel 
tubes nine inches in exterior diameter set 
closely together, and each made in four 
segments, whose junctions form ribs. The 
upper and lower members are eight feet 
apart. The whole structure is stiffened by 
systems of diagonal, vertical, and horizontal 
braces. 

The arch formed a very important mem- 
ber of many wooden bridges, and still does 
of some iron trusses. 

Another tubular arch bridge is that of the 
Washington Aqueduct across Rock Creek, 
erected by General Meigs. It has a span of 
200 feet and a rise of twenty feet, and con- 
sists of two ribs, each composed of seven- 
teen cast-iron pipes, flanged and bolted to- 
gether. The pipes are lined with staves to 
prevent freezing, and have a clear water 
way of three feet six inches. Through them 
passes the water for the supply of the city 
of Washington. 

The Fairmount Bridge across the Schuyl- 
kill is 100 feet wide, was built by the Phce- 
nixville Bridge Company, and is the finest 
example of an iron truss bridge in this 
country. 

Those Chinese prevent many a broad and 
full statement by having anticipated the 
Western barbarians in so many things : gun- 
powder, the mariner's compass, movable- 
type printing, paper of rags, glazing of pot- 
tery, silk, and boring for gas and brine. 
Suspension-bridges also have been long used 
in China and Thibet. One noticed by Tur- 
ner, near Tchin-Chien, was 140 feet long, 
on four catenary chains ; one in Quito, ob- 
served by Hmnboldt, was of rope four inch- 
es in diameter, made of agave fibre ; one in 
Aligpore, in Hindostan, is 130 feet in length, 
and made of cane with iron fastenings ; 
Hooker notices several in Nepaul ; Scamozzi 



refers to suspen- 
sion - bridges in 
Europe in 1615. 

The suspen- 
sion - bridge was 
waiting for iron. 
The first iron sus- 
pension-bridge in 
Europe, possibly 
in the world, was 
a chain - bridge 
across the Tees 
in 1741. Telford 
threw one across 
the Menai Straits, 
570 feet, in 1820 ; 
it is of rods with 
coupling links. 
The Fribourg 
Bridge, 880 feet, 
was erected in 
1830. The Ni- 
agara Railway 
Bridge, 821 feet, 
was erected by 
Roebling, 1855. 
The Wheeling 
Bridge, across the 
Ohio, 1010 feet, 
erected by Ellet, 
was blown down. 
The Cincinnati 
Bridge, across the 
Ohio, was con- 
structed by Roeb- 
ling in 1866. It 
is 1057 feet be- 
tween piers ; each 
cable has 5180 
wires, each laid 
with a given 
strain to bear its 
part of the load. 
This was a grand 
conception. The 
weight of wire is 
1,050,183 pounds. 
The new Niagara 
Bridge, just be- 
low the basin of 
the falls, is 1264 
feet span, 190 feet 
high, and was 
erected in 1869. 



W 



n 



1 Q 



i -i ) 



m 



88 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 




nA 



-j.j-^il^;:j. .':.:" : : ■ - - ~r: ' . ' . ■ ! : ; j ;-.v . 



above the water ; that no centring should 
be used to temporarily obstruct naviga- 
tion. Stephenson made the first estimates, 
and Fairbairn brought into use his great 
knowledge in the strength of materials 
and skill in the disposition of parts to 
bear strains to which different portions 
of a structure are subjected. The tubes 
are respectively 260, 472, 472, and 260 
feet, the larger ones weighing about 
4,032,000 pounds each. The tubes were 
built on floats, towed to their positions, 
raised by powerful hydrostatic jacks, the 
masonry beiug built beneath them as the 
lifting proceeded. The jacks rested on 
beams on the ledges of the towers. The 
lifting chains weighed 224,000 pounds 
each, and were of sis-feet sections, which 
were taken out, a section at a time, after 
each lift was made, and the tube rested 
on the masonry beneath it while the pis- 
ton of the jack descended ready for an- 
other lift. The pressure of the water 
beneath the ram was 2% tons per square 
inch. The tubes were lifted 100 feet 
above tide-water, ascending in high per- 
pendicular grooves in the faces of the 
towers, which were closed up by masonry 
as the lifting proceeded. It was opened 

IKON TRUSS AND LATTICE BRIDGES. I0I> tFattlC LU 1850. 

a, b, c, are forms of trusses for moderate spans, a, The Victoria Bridge at Montreal had 
rectanuglar-tube bridge b iron arch and lattice girder nQ h ext remely heavy work. It is 176 
bridge, c, strut girder bridge, d, the principal span of •> J 

the Kuilinburg Railway bridge over the Leek, a branch of feet less than two miles long, having 
the Rhine It has nine spans; the one shown is 515 feet twellt y-five spans, the centre one 330 feet, 
total length, 492 feet clear span. Its only rival in length ° r ' 

is the middle span of Captain Eads's bridge across the the others each 240 feet long. The centre 
Mississippi at St. Louis, e is a truss bridge over the Avon span is 60 feet above the summer level f 
in England, the mid length resting on a cluster of screw 

piles. * ne water, and has a slight descent to- 

ward each end. The cost was £1,250,000. 
But one of the bridges mentioned above 
was standing when the old bell of the red 
brick house in Philadelphia rang out, "Pro- 
claim liberty throughout the land and to all 
the inhabitants thereof!" The solitary ex- 
ception was the chain -bridge across the 
Tees. This bridge has long since passed 
away, was but a solitary precursor of the 
coming age of iron bridges, and in mode of 
structure chains have given way to wire, 
first of iron, then of steel. 

WOOD-WORKING. 

In no department of mechanical progress 
has the advancement been more thorough 
than in the machinery for the working of 




We are now waiting for the completion 
of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, 5862 
feet between termini, 1600 feet between 
river piers, and 80 feet wide. 

The tubular bridge erected at Conway, 
Wales, preceded that over the Menai Straits. 
Succeeding them is the Victoria Bridge 
across the St. Lawrence River at Montreal. 
The principle of all is the same : a tube of 
rectangular section forming a hollow gird- 
er. The material is cast and wrought iron, 
so disposed as to secure the valuable feat- 
ures of each kind. It was demanded that 
trains should be permitted to cross each 
way simultaneously at full speed on the 
two tracks; that it should be 100 feet 



THE CIRCULAR SAW. 



89 




POKTAItI.E CIRCULAR SAW. 



wood. Up to the beginning of the last 
quarter of the eighteenth century what 
were the tools and modes of the wood- 
worker ? With the axe, adze, pit-saw, whip- 
saw, handsaw, chisel, and rasp excellent 
work was done; but it may be said that, 
with the exception of a few saw -mills, 
there was no machinery for wood-workiug. 
How infrequent were the saw-mills may be 
gathered from the fact that one established 
in England in 1663 by a Dutchman was 
abandoned from fear of personal violence 
on the part of the populace, and in 1767 
one at Limehouse, in the eastern part of 
London, was destroyed by a mob of saw- 
yers who considered their craft in danger. 

The writer distinctly recollects when logs 
and tree trunks were habitually sawed from 
end to end, to work them into dimension 
stuff, by two sawyers, one standing on the 
log and the other in a pit beneath with a 
veil over his eyes to keep out the sawdust. 
And what a hard-working, sad, drunken set 
these sawyers were, and how the top-sawyer 
bossed the wretch in the hole, who pulled 
down, while he above, with shoulders like 
an Atlas, swung his weight upon the handles 
above ! This lasted well into our century ; 
but now we have a host of saw-mills of 
various kinds working on the most exten- 
sive scale at the great lumbering centres, 
and machines for special work in all cities 



where the stuff thus roughly "got out'' 
into square stuff or merchantable lumber is 
sawed into plank, dimension lumber, slats, 
scale-boards, veneers, and what not. 

The circular saw was introduced into En- 
gland in 1790, bvit its inventor is not known. 
General Sir Samuel Bentham, the most re- 
nowned of all inventors of wood-working 
machinery, and to whom we shall have to 
refer several times, patented in 1793 the 
bench, slit, parallel guide, and sliding bevel 
guide. The machine has now attained an 
excellence and completeness which leave 
little to be desired. 

In the stationary form of the machine 
the saws are either single or in gangs. The 
portable kind has an upper saw to complete 
the kerf made only partially through the 
larger logs by the lower saw. Such is 
known as a double saw. The log carriage 
travels on ways, the feed being by a pinion 
meshing into a rack beneath the carriage. 

After the cut the head-blocks are simul- 
taneously moved up, bringing the log a dis- 
tance nearer to the saw equal to the thick- 
ness of the board desired, plus the width of 
the kerf made by the saw. Very rapid and 
handy are these saws, but the men of '76 
never dreamed of such a thing. We had 
rude gate saws driven by flutter wheels, or 
geared up for motion from a larger wheel. 
There was then no premonition of the saw- 



90 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



mills which hum in all c-iir ports and huzz 
in all the forests of the land. 

The veneer saw, a peculiar adaptation of 
the circular saw, with thin segmental teeth 
on a thin hub of large diameter, was invent- 
ed by Bramah. 

Nor must we forget the scroll-saw, also 
uamed a jig saw from its rapid vertical mo- 
tion. It has a narrow thin blade which 
eats its way in a wonderful manner through 
the stuff which is moved against it, sliding 
on the surface of a flat table through which 
the saw reciprocates. The band saw is for 




BAND 6 AW. 



the same purpose, but is a steel ribbon 
with a serrated edge, and runs on two 
band wheels, one of which is driven by the 
steam-power. 

The planing-machine for wood assumed 
three shapes before it settled into its pres- 



ent preferred form ; indeed, there are yet 
two kinds. General Bentham's machine, 
patented in 1791, was like an immense plane 
pushed over the surface of the board. Bra- 
mah's machine, 1802, is what is called the 
traverse planer, the cutters being on the low- 
er edge of a revolving disk, which revolves 
with its vertical arbor above the board, 
which passes beneath it. The more com- 
mon and generally useful form of the plan- 
ing-machine has revolving cutters on hor- 
izontal axes, which work the top of the 
board. By an extension of the principle 
another cutter may work the lower surface, 
and two others on vertical axes dress the 
edges, or square stuff may be dressed on all 
sides, or one or more of the cutters may have 
such conformation as to plane mouldings on 
the stuff. 

This is the moulding-machine, whose use- 
fulness it is hard to exaggerate, but the 
admirable Bentham and the equally useful 
and perhaps equally brilliant Bramah would 
gaze with keen zest upon the outgrowth of 
their genius and pains. 

Another form of moulding-machine has a 
vertical shaft, with cutters of the conforma- 
tion required protruding through a table, 
so as to work the edges of the stuff brought 
against them, directed by the hand or by a 
guide. 

The joiner, or general ivood-tvorker, is anoth- 
er of the late additions to the shop. The 
number of years it has been in use can al- 
most be counted on the fingers of the two 
hands. Though the term may not have 
been so intended, yet it is well placed, for 




MOULDING-MACHINE. 



MORTISING-MACHLNES AND LATHES. 



91 



it holds a very commanding 
rank. It planes flat, mould- 
ing, and beaded surfaces; it 
rips or crosscuts ; it bores and 
counterbores ; it mortises and 
tenons, executes squaring-up, 
grooving, tonguing, rabbet- 
ing, mitring, chamfering, and 
wedge-cutting ; it is a jack- 
of-all-work, the handy man of 
the shop, "with unflagging en- 
ergy and singular versatility. 
It well represents tbe mature 
mind of the ages, being a mitl- 
tum in parvo, the combination 
of a set of separate machines, 
possessing the attributes of 
each, which it is ready to turn 
to account at any time, not 
always together, but in rapid 
succession at short notice. 

The mortisiug-machine may 
have had a precarious exist- 
ence before General Sir Sam- 
uel Beutham, but we have no 
trace of it. Ben tkam describes 
the self-acting machine in his 
patent of 1793. His descrip- 
tion includes the operation by 
which a hole previously bored is elongated 
by a chisel into a slot, and also the mode 
of making the mortise by a rotating cutter 
during the traverse of the work. He also 
had a pivoted table for oblique mortising, 
and a double or forked chisel for making 
narrow parallel mortises. 

Brunei's machine for mortising the shells 
of ships' blocks was made for the British 
Admiralty in 1804. The block is chucked 
in a carriage, and has an automatic feed 
movement by means of a screw. The chis- 
el (or chisels for blocks with more than one 
score) is in a vertically reciprocating slider 
in the frame above. 

The latest improvements in mortising- 
machines have much increased their capaci- 
ty and range of work, special machines be- 
ing made for various duties. One principal 
feature is that for bringing the chisel into 
action and determining its depth of stroke 
by simply pressing upon a treadle, the chisel 
being quiescent as soon as the foot is lifted, 
and this without disconnection with the 
motor. 




;. .,.., :«f.,r.' . * 



,:■>■■ / J 



GENERAL WOOD-WORKER. 

The tendency of the age is to rotary mo- 
tion. The first machine in the world, per- 
haps, was the throwing wheel of the potter. 
In the oldest of the Egyptian paintings the 
creative spirit, Knep, is represented as turn- 
ing man upon the potter's wheel. The Greek 
tornos does not appear to have been much 
superior to the pole lathe which was used by 
our ancestors, and is yet the useful machine 
of the Kabyles of Africa and the mountain- 
eers of the Carpathians. In this the work 
is rotated in one direction by a treadle and 
a cord which winds on the mandrel, and in 
the other by the recoil of a spring pole. Our 
ancestors did not use turned work to any 
great extent ; the hatchet and the drawing- 
knife fashioned the furniture of the rustic ; 
a rather smoother mode of preparation fell 
to the lot of that made for the gentler born. 
Now the turning lathe is the machine of 
speed ; broom handles are turned, and pails, 
clothes-pins, and the very commonest of ar- 
ticles. 

The wood-turning lathe preceded that of 
metal many centuries, as that for clay long 



92 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 




blanohard's spoke lathe. 

preceded the wood-lathe. We pass at once 
to the lathe for turning irregular forms, in- 
vented by Thomas Blanchard, of Boston, 
Massachusetts, in 1828, and since much im- 
proved by himself and others. 

It is made for turning spokes, axe-han- 
dles, gun-stocks, and various other crooked 
and difficult shapes. The illustration shows 
it as adapted for turning spokes. These 
have very different shapes at different parts 
of their lengths, and spokes for different 
kinds of vehicles require very different 
shapes and proportions. Like the job of 
standing the egg on end, suggested by 
Christopher Colon to his curious friends, it 
is very easy to understand when explained ; 
but it was a very ingenious contrivance and 
a great acquisition. The model is placed 
upon a slowly rotating mandrel at top ; a tra- 
cer rests against each side of it, and governs 
the motions of the cutter frame, causing the 
revolving cutter to advance or recede to or 
from the stuff which is chucked between 
the centres of a mandrel below, and caused 
to rotate in correspondence with the model 
above. The cutter frame has a longitudi- 
nal motion along the frame, its cutter pass- 
ing from end to end of the stick, and cut- 
ting more or less deeply in exact conformity 
with the model above. The piece to be cut 
is not shown in position, as it would hide 
the view of the cutter head. 

It would not be fair to omit the state- 
ment that Condamine, De la Hire, and Plu- 
nder mention lathes in which the cutter is 
governed by a tracer passing over the irreg- 
ular surface of a model ; also that Brunei's 
machine for making the groove around ships' 
blocks for the ropes by which they are at- 
tached to the rigging has a revolving disk 



of brass with two cutters which receive 
their direction and depth from a shaper 
placed parallel thereto. 

The first important collection of special 
wood-working tools was the machinery for 
making tackle blocks, invented by the elder 
Brunei, and made by Maudslay, 1802-08, for 
the British Admiralty. Fortunately Gener- 
al Bentham was at that time inspector of 
naval works, and so it only took twelve 
months to obtain the sanction of the com- 
missioners to the adoption of the plans of 
the three excellent masters. 

The machines are in three different sets, 
three in a set, for making different sizes, 
each set having a certain range of adjusta- 
bility as to the sizes of blocks turned out. 
Altogether they make 214 sizes and kinds. 
With two additional machines for making 
dead-eyes, two for making iron pins, and 
one large boring machine, the number of 
machines is fifty. They were set up in 
1808 ; cost $230,000. The saving over hand 
labor is variously estimated at from $83,000 
to $150,000 per annum. Brunei, "the in- 
genious American mechanic," as Tonilinson 
calls him, received £1 per diem for superin- 
tendence, £1000 for the models, and £17,000 
for his head-work. 

The factory system is now in full vogue 
with wood-workers, and they can not desire 
a more honorable and thoroughly excellent 
triumvirate of leaders than Bentham, Brunei, 
Maudslay. 

Our space will allow of scarcely more 
than a recapitulation of the remaining 
achievements which distinguish the pres- 
ent century. 

ELEVATORS. 

The elevator, as an ordinary apparatus in 
a hotel, business house, or building devoted 
to offices, is an American institution. The 
man-engine and the hoisting platform or 
cage have been for nearly a century the or- 
dinary means of ascending mining shafts ; 
the cage has more lately been introduced 
into factories to save the operators the labor 
of climbing, and now the winding apparatus 
has been much improved, the car luxuri- 
ously furnished and lighted, and safety de- 
vices introduced to prevent overwinding 
and to arrest descent if the rope breaks. 

There are three principal forms : 1. That 
in which the winding drum is driven by a 



ELEVATORS. 



93 



steam-engine, the rope passing over a pulley 
above the shaft, and thence downward to 
the suspended cage. 2. The hydraulic ele- 
vator, in which water from the city main 
acts upon a ram with great force, and fleets, 
as the sailor might say, the blocks of a com- 
pound tackle, drawing upon the rope which 
passes over the sheaves at a rate propor- 
tioned to the number of sheaves involved. 
3. The direct hydraulic lift; in this the 
platform is supported by a piston working 
in a cylinder into which water is admitted 
from the city main. This requires a piston 
as long above the lowest floor as the height 
to be lifted, and a well or cylinder as great 
a depth below it. As the water runs into 
the cylinder it acts against the lower end 
of the piston, and when the platform is to 
be lowered, a faucet is opened, which al- 
lows the water to escape. It is safe, and is 
probably a French invention — the Ascenseur 
Edoux. 

Besides these, there is a peculiarly Amer- 
ican system of hoisting and storing grain, 
forming a prominent feature in the views 
of our sea-board and lake cities. An eleva- 
tor-leg, as it is termed, reaches into the bin 
or well into which the wagons or cars have 
been discharged, or into the hold of the 
vessel. This leg is the extension device 
round which passes an endless belt with 
cups, each of which runs up full of grain 
and discharges into a hopper above, where 
the grain is weighed, aud from whence it 
passes by spouts to the various bins. From 
these it is drawn, when reshipped, into cars 
or vessels. 

In the American practice the grain is dis- 
charged into the hopper of a weighiug ma- 
chine gauged exactly for one hundred bush- 
els ; by opening a valve the contents are 
sent by a spout to the bin, the valve closed, 
and the elevating process resumed. Seven 
thousand bushels an hour are thus weighed. 
An elevator at Milwaukee is 280 feet long 
and 80 feet wide. The total length of the 
great driving-belt, urged by a 200 horse- 
power engine, is 280 feet, that is, the half, 
extending from cellar to comb, is 140 feet, 
and the down half is of course equal to it. 
This belt is 36 inches wide and three-quar- 
ters of an inch thick, and is made of six plies 
or thicknesses of canvas, with sheets of India 
rubber laid between them. It drives nine 



receiving elevators, or belts set with buck- 
ets, each of which lifts the grain 140 feet. 
The buckets are made of thick tin bound 
with hoop-iron, and are well riveted to the 
belt at intervals of fourteen inches. They 
are 6 inches across the mouth, 18 iuches long, 
and when full each contains a peck. They 
do not usually go up quite full, but, allow- 
ing for this, there are 100 pecks (25 bushels) 
loaded on one side of the belt whenever it 
is at work. If all nine are running at once, 
as is often the case, the quantity of wheat 
lifted on these swift-running belts is 225 
bushels. The established weight of a bush- 
el of No. 2 Milwaukee spring wheat is 55 
pounds. This would make the total lift of 
the receiving elevators during the time 
they are at work over 12,000 pounds. 

The bins into which this wheat is poured 
are of great size, being 60 feet deep, 20 wide, 
and 10 across, containing 12,000 cubic feet. 
The total receiving and storing capacity of 
this building is 1,500,000 bushels. Of the 
crop of 1869 it received 7,000,000 bushels. 

In discharging into the lake grain ves- 
sels, as soon as a ship is moored beside an 
elevator the hatches are removed, and great 
spouts extended over them from the bottom 
of one of the bins described. The gate is 
raised, and a torrent of wheat pours down. 
The loading power of these spouts is 12,000 
bushels an hour. A vessel with a capacity 
for 18,000 bushels may be loaded in an hour 
and a half. The Oswego and Ogdensburg 
schooners, and vessels destined for the 
Welland Canal, usually take from 12,000 to 
20,000 bushels. The Buffalo vessels are lar- 
ger, often receiving 30,000, and in a few 
cases 45,000 bushels. 

No other mode of handling grain has ever 
been devised which affords such facilities 
for unloading, weighing, storing, loading, 
moving from one bin to another for exam- 
ination or for ventilation. A hundred years 
ago the shovel, sack, and the hoisting chain, 
or else the wheelbarrow, were the usual fa- 
cilities of the grain merchant. 

DOMESTIC MACHINERY. 

Domestic machinery is not the least impor- 
tant of the features which characterize the 
present age. 

The sewing-machine is an American inven- 
tion of the last forty years. As was pre- 



94 



MECHANICAL PKOGRESS. 



viously remarked of reapers, the European 
attempts at making machines to supersede 
the hand method served to exhibit the dif- 
ficulty of the problem, but in no important 
degree to solve it. The shoe-sewing ma- 
chine of Thomas Saint, patented in England 
in 1790, had a single thread, which was driv- 
en by a forked needle through a hole pre- 
viously punched by an awl, and was then 
caught by a looper which held the loop so 
that it was entered by the needle and 
thread in their next descent, making a cro- 
chet stitch. The feed and the stitch-tight- 
ening movements were automatic. 

The sewing-machine of Thimonnier, of 
Paris, was used in 1830 for making army 
clothing. Eighty of these machines, made 
of wood, were destroyed by a mob, which 
regarded them as an " invention of the ene- 
my." They were afterward made of metal. 
Adams and Dodge, of Monkton, Vermont, in 
1818, and more especially J. J. Greenough, 
of New York, in 1842, added improvements. 
Walter Hunt, 1832-35, made and sold lock- 
stitch sewing-machines, but neglected to 
pursue the business, which consequently at- 
tracted but little attention at the time. His 
extreme versatility prevented success ; his 
inventions absorbed his time, and he seem- 
ingly had none left for securing the pecun- 
iary results of his genius. He just missed, 
and by mere inattention, one of the grandest 
opportunities of the century. Elias Howe, 
with inferior inventive abilities, but with 
an adaptedness to follow out a single object 
persistently, and with business ability, reap- 
ed the field. The world, as we have had oc- 
casion to remark previously, thanks the man 
who gives an improvement into its hands. 
The name of Elias Howe is indissolubly as- 
sociated with the success of the sewing- 
machine. This machine is no exception to 
the ordinary rule that an invention is a 
growth rather than an inspiration, and the 
discussion on the relative merits of invent- 
ors has been both voluminous and acrimo- 
nious. Examiners, commissioners, judges, 
each in their turn have found it a very knot- 
t v question how to apportion the respective 
credits. It is no small matter to conceive 
the need and apply one's mind to the intri- 
cacies of the problem. Then come the de- 
tails. The original machine had a simple 
needle, and made a running stitch ; next we 



see a machine which made a succession of 
loops, forming a crochet stitch ; here the ma- 
chine paused a while. A score of years was 
passed in devising modes of feeding, contin- 
uous or intermitting, by various arrange- 
ments of parts. The greatest advance up 
to that time was the lock stitch, invented 
by Hunt, and made by passing a shuttle 
containing a lower thread through the loop 
of an upper thread carried down through 
the cloth by an eye-pointed needle. This 
was also the feature of the " Howe" machine. 
Following this were many improvements, 
variations, and nice adjustments, such as A. 
B. Wilson's four-motion feed and rotating 
looping -hook, the latter of which draws 
down the needle thread, and drops through 
it the spool containing the lower thread. 
There is no room here even to recite the 
prominent improvements. Finally, the ma- 
chine is much indebted to the skill and en- 
terprise of the mechanics and tradesmen 
in whose hands it has grown to the won- 
derful proportions it now exhibits. With- 
out impugning the genius of the earlier in- 
ventors, it may still be said that the present 
proximate perfection of the machine is due 
to the men who took up the work where 
Howe left it. 

The original Howe machine had a curved 
eye-pointed needle attached to the end of a 
vibrating lever, and carrying the upper 
thread. The shuttle, carrying the lower 
thread between the needle and the upper 
thread, was driven in its. race by means of 
two strikers carried on the ends of vibra- 
ting arms worked by two cams. The cloth 
was attached by pins on the edge of a thin 
steel rib called a baster-plate, which had 
holes engaged by the teeth of a small in- 
termittingly moving pinion. This was the 
feed, and clumsy enough. 

Space permits but one illustration, and 
the Singer is given as a representative ma- 
chine. The well-known table and treadle 
are omitted, and the principal working 
parts only are shown. The motion derived 
from the treadle is imparted to the hori- 
zontal shaft, and communicated in two di- 
rections to the needle bar and to the shuttle 
driver. Various subsidiary movements oc- 
cur which are tolerably familiar to our read- 
ers, and need not be explained at length. 

About 2000 patents have been granted in 



(j2> 



SEWING-MACHINES. 



95 




BINGEK SEWING-MACHINE. 



the United States for sewing-machines: 
one improvement after another, until there 
seems to be no end to the devices. Some 
have reference to special parts, others are 
adaptations of the machine to new uses and 
materials to which it had not before been 
accustomed. 

If required to point out three mechanical 
contrivances upon which the most extraor- 
dinary versatility of invention has been ex- 
pended, the writer would most unhesitating- 
ly instance the harvester, the breech-loading 
fire-arm, and the sewing-machine; each of 
these has thousands of patents, and each 
of them is the growth of the last forty 
years. 

Although each of these was on trial, and 
to some extent a success, previous to 1850, 
yet it may be said, in general terms, that 
their celebrity and usefulness date from 
about that time. The Hussey and M'Cor- 
mick reapers were largely introduced to our 
countrymen by their success at the London 
World's Fair in 1851 ; the breech-loaders 
were forced upon an unwilling Ordnance 
Bureau by the exigencies of the late war, 
the demand of the public, and the stern de- 
termination of some civilians who were in 
authority ; the first valuable working sew- 
ing-machine was the " Singer," made in the 
fall of 1850. Last year (1873) about 600,000 



sewing - machines were made and sold ; 
232,444 of these were of the " Singer." 

The security of patents has encouraged 
men of talent, capital, and enterprise to en- 
gage in the sewing-machine business, and 
as much as $40,000,000 is now estimated to 
be employed in that manufacture. The 
retail prices of sewing-machines bear no 
proper relation to their cost, but the prices 
to the consumer result from the method 
of selling by means of a system of agen- 
cies and traveling canvassers, to the latter 
of whom so large a profit is allowed that 
they can afford to sell them on time, on tri- 
al, or on payment by installments. There 
are cheaper means, as with ordinary tools 
and articles of consumption and wear, of 
bringing the producer and consumer togeth- 
er ; but in the sale of sewing-machines no 
substitute has been found for the personal 
solicitations of canvassers, who scour the 
country with their wagons, and receive for 
their pay one-half of the purchase price. 
The organization of the corps of agents by 
the general agent absorbs another fifteen 
per cent., so that the manufacturer receives 
only about thirty -five per cent, of the price. 
This system will not last longer than the 
necessity for personal effort at the homes of 
the people ; and when it becomes an estab- 
lished want in every family, as it is now an 



96 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



actual need, the price may be expected to 
come down to what will afford but a usual 
profit upon the capital and skill employed. 
The principal patents have already expired, 
aud the business will soon be open to com- 
petition, when the best devised and con- 
structed machiues will be sold merely on 
their own merits, without the adventitious 
aids of exclusive rights to sustain prices. 

The business of boot and shoe making 
has received a fillip from the introduction 
of machinery, enriching the manufacturers 
and cheapening the product. Without oc- 
cupying room by even naming the machines 
which furnish the shoe factory, it may be 
stated that the M'Kay sewing-machine was 
the result of three years' mental labor and 
hand-work, and involved an expenditure of 
$130,000 before a practical working machine 
was completed and put in operation in 1861. 
Since this time 225,000,000 pairs of boots and 
shoes have been made on these machines in 
the United States, besides many millions 
in England and on the continent of Europe. 
A very skillful operator has occasionally 
sewed as many as 900 pairs in a day of ten 
hours, and any good operator can easily 
sew from 500 to 600 pairs per day. 

The knitting-machine is another form of 
iron-fingered curiosity, which will knit at 
an unexampled rate, and with admirable 
evenness of tension. It is singular, too, the 
variety of stitch that may be made on the 
machine by certain peculiar dispositions and 
combinations of the needles. 



We must not forget the apple-parer, which 
was quoted some thirty years since in En- 
gland as the last comical vagary of the fun- 
ny and awkward American cousin. A par- 
ing bee may be had without apple-parers, 
but it takes much longer to empty the ap- 
ple baskets and fill the kettle with the quar- 
ters, which are stewed in boiled cider to 
make apple-butter for the winter pies and 
" sass." It was no chance thought or mere 
whim that set our folks to work. American 
patents for apple-parers were granted in 
1803, 1809, 1810, and since that time about 
eighty patents have been granted for other 
implements for the same purpose. 

Besides this we have for the cook and 
kitchen-maid the almond-peeler, pea and 
bean shellers, peach and cherry stoners ; 
raisin - seeders, bread and cheese cutters 
butter-workers, sausage grinders and stuff- 
ers, coffee-mills, corn-poppers, cream-freez 
ers, dish-washers, egg-boilers, flour-sifters 
flat-irons, knife - sharpeners, and lemon 
squeezers. Then we have for the dairy 
maid the milking-machines, milk -coolers, 
churns, cheese-presses, and a number of oth 
er aids to leisure. 




LAMB'S KNITTING-MAOIIINE. 



SAFES. 



97 



We have, moreover, the baby-jumper and 
baby- walker for the nursery, and a wonder- 
ful variety of brooms, mops, carpet stretch- 
ers and fasteners, for the footman and house- 
maid. 

Nor must the washing -machine, another 
strictly American notion, be disregarded. 
There are hundreds of patents. The typical 
forms are few ; the variations on these forms 
are most amusingly numerous. The ins and 
the outs of invention have been wonderful- 
ly diversified. The typical forms are, agi- 
tators, rubbers (reciprocating and rotary), 
centrifugal, pressure-rollers, pounders, dash- 
ers, plunger and balls, and the circulatory 
system. 

The wringer, consisting of a pair of rub- 
ber rollers, is a necessary laundry imple- 
ment. 

SAFES. 

In former times strong rooms and iron- 
bound oaken boxes were used to hold the 
cash and the muniments of merchants and 
families. Such chests were fastened by let- 
ter locks, which are the predecessors of our 
permutation locks. These boxes were hard- 
ly burglar-proof, and no defense against fire, 
but were a security against peculation by 
dishonest servants. 

About 1776 began the manufacture of 
sheet -iron safes, banded with hoop iron 
crossing on the outside at right angles. 
These were fastened by locks throwing 
several bolts, and also by a bar with hasp, 
staple, and padlock. Cast-iron chests were 
used in 1800. 

Attempts were previously made to render 
strong rooms fire-proof by building the walls 
double and pouring in gypsum ; but the first 
attempts at fire-proof portable safes were 
early in the nineteenth century, and con- 
sisted of wooden boxes covered with sheet 
iron and riveted bands, and an intervening 
thickness of gypsum. 

After various experiments, in which the 
wooden box was saturated with potash lye 
or alum to render it incombustible, and was 
coated inside the sheet-iron casing with clay, 
lime, graphite, or mica, the boxes were made 
of iron inside and outside, with intervening 
non-combustible material, and known as 
"double chests." Such was the fire-proof 
safe patented in England in 1801. Asbes- 
tua was used in 1834. Chubb in 1835 at- 
7 



tempted to make the safe burglar-proof by 
lining it with steel or case-hardened iron 
plates. 

In 1843 Wilder made a safe of heavy plates 
of iron, with a filling of hydrated gypsum. 
Hydraulic cement, steatite, alum, and the 
neutralized and dried residuum of the so- 
called soda-water manufacture, were suc- 
cessively used. 

Another idea was to connect the inter- 
vening space of the safe with the water 
main, to prevent a charring heat from reach- 
ing the contents when the outside became 
exposed to fire. 

Lillie used slabs of chilled cast iron, and 
flowed cast iron over wrought -iron ribs. 
Herring made safes with boiler-iron exteri- 
or, hardened steel inner safe, and the inter- 
space filled with a casting of franklinite 
over rods of soft steel. 

The American safe of the best quality is 
really a first-class production, and is not 
equaled elsewhere. The locks are also won- 
derful specimens of ingenuity, worthy of an 
extended notice. 

Safe-deposit companies iu our principal 
cities have ranks of safes with curious 
unpickable locks inclosed in a room with 
grated doors, lighted by gas, and watched 
by attendants. These are rented to private 
parties. 

Various plans have also been devised to 
give notice of tampering with the safe — 
electro -magnetic alarms, whistles sounded 
by setting free a body of compressed air im- 
prisoned between the air-tight walls, gen- 
erating asphyxiating gas in the chamber to 
choke the burglars. It is a race between 
the skilled mechanic and the equally skill- 
ful professional thief. 

FIRE-ARMS AND ORDNANCE. 

From the old wall piece or arquebuse with 
which the Swiss defeated Charles the Bold 
in 1476, to the Sharps, Eemington, Win- 
chester, or Maynard rifle, or the Parker shot- 
gun, is a great step. So of the pieces used 
by the cavalry of 1554, and named from Pis- 
toja, to the Colt or the Smith and Wesson 
revolver of our day. Equally great is the 
advance in ordnance from the cannon used 
at the siege of Cordova, 1280, and those with 
which Ferdinand captured Gibraltar from 
the Moors in 1308. The bore of the larger 



98 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



cannon down to the middle of the fifteenth 
century was as great as any modern pieces ; 
but they carried large stones, had small 
powder chambers like a mortar, and could 
not possibly have withstood the modern 
charges of powder. The bronze gun Tzar 
Pooschka, cast a.d. 1586, had a bore of 36 
inches ; its projectile was said to weigh 
2000 pounds, but its powder chamber had 
only 19 inches bore, only about 1 to 3.6 the 
area of the ball chamber. Its weight was 
86,248 pounds. The bronze gun of Bejapoor, 
a.d. 1548, had a calibre of 28.5 inches, weight 
89,600 pounds ; that of Mohammed II., a.d. 
1464, 25 inches, weight 41,888 pounds. 

The modern guns are of scarcely equal 
calibre, seldom of greater weight, but are of 
very much greater strength, and the force 
of the projectile, due to its velocity, may be 
said to be out of comparison greater than 
that of those pieces of antiquity. 

The Woolwich (England) 35-ton gun 
weighs 79,084 pounds ; the large Armstrong 
(Big Will), 50,400 ; Krupp's 14-inch, 100,000 ; 
Rodman's smooth-bore 20-inch, 116,497. Ev- 
ery body is casting heavier and heavier guns, 
and these figures will not long represent the 
condition of things. The latest advance is 
in the guns for the British armor-clad Inflex- 
ible, which has armor 24 inches thick, and is 
to be furnished with four guns of 81 tons 
weight each (181,440 pounds). The total 
length of this gun, including the plug-screw 
at the breech end, is 27 feet ; length of bore, 
24 feet ; calibre not determined, but either 
14 or 16 inches. The ball of the piece, reck- 
oned at 14 inches calibre, will be from 1000 
to 1200 pounds, the charge of powder one- 
sixth of the weight of the ball. The 1000- 
pound shot, at an initial velocity of 1300 
feet per second, will have a punching force 
of 11,715 foot-tons, the ball of 1200 pounds a 
penetrative force of 14,058 foot-tons. Eight 
years ago the English 7-ton gun was con- 
sidered the limit of production. Entirely 
new sets of tools and plants have succeed- 
ed each other, as the 35-ton and 81-ton guns 
have been produced. 

In getting gracefully back again from the 
great guns of the world to the military and 
sporting arms, we may pause a moment to 
regard a class of weapons which partake of 
the characteristics of each, known as ma- 
chine guns, having a plurality of barrels, and 



mounted upon a carriage. The first hint of 
these was a piece upon a tripod, having a 
chambered breech revolving behind a single 
barrel. This was patented in England in 
1718. The clumsy contrivance which Fieschi 
used in filing on Louis Philippe had a row of 
barrels fired simultaneously, and anticipated 
in the horizontal arrangement of its barrels 
the Requa battery in this country and the 
Abbertini mitrailleur of the continent of 
Europe. The mitrailleur of the French has 
a cluster of barrels, in whose rear is placed 
a chambered plate, each of whose chambers 
corresponds to one of the cluster of barrels, 
against whose rear it is locked before firing. 

The most efficient weapons, all things 
considered, are the Gatling battery gun and 
the Taylor machine gun. 

The Gatling gun, invented by Mr. J. R. 
Gatling, of Indianapolis, has now a regular 
place in the military equipment of the United 
States and of England. It has a revolving 
cluster of parallel barrels, in the rear of 
each of which, and rotating therewith, is 
its own loading, firing, and spent-capsule- 
retracting mechanism. The usual American 
ammunition with metallic capsule and the 
fulminate in the flange is used. The bar- 
rels and the mechanisms for loading and 
firing are rigidly secured upon an axial 
shaft, which is revolved by means of bevel 
gearing and a crank. The ammunition is 
fed in at a hopper. Each barrel receives its 
charge as it comes to the top in the course 
of its revolutions, and fires as it comes to 
its lowest position, the firing being thus 
consecutive, and with a rapidity depending 
upon the rate of rotation of the crank. The 
complement of the hopper, 400 cartridges, 
may be fired in one minute if desired. The 
gun is manufactured at the Colt Works, 
Hartford. 

The Taylor gun is the invention of Mr. 
Taylor, of Knoxville, Tennessee, and has a 
cluster of stationary barrels, in the rear of 
which is a chamber to receive the cartridges ; 
these are secured in a charging block, and 
forced into the barrels by a lateral move- 
ment of the vertical handle seen in the en- 
graving. This handle is attached to an os- 
cillating sleeve having internal studs, which 
work in spiral grooves in a sliding breech 
cylinder. The latter carries plungers, one 
for each barrel, containing central firing 



FIRE-ARMS AND ORDNANCE. 



99 




TAYLORS MACHINE GUN. 



pins, retracted by rotation of a crank shaft 
carrying suitable tappets, so that the bar- 
rels may be discharged in rapid succession. 
The piece is built at the Remington Works, 
Ilion, New York. 

The military and sporting rifles and shot- 
guns of our country have no superiors. The 
trial at Creedmoor (1874) between the Amer- 
ican and Irish teams did not prove the suj>e- 
riority of the breech-loader over the muzzle- 
loader, nor conversely ; nor is there any dif- 
ference worth mentioning between a string 
of 931 (Irish) and of 934 (American) in a pos- 
sible 1080. It proved, however, the excel- 
lent character of the guns and the steadi- 
ness, sight, and skill of the men on both 
sides. The value of the breech-loading gun 
has been determined by other considerations 
than the actual shooting force, as rapidity 
of loading, the avoidance of shifting the gun 
end for end in loading, and also of assum- 
ing positions in handling which expose the 
marksman. The American style of fixed am- 
munition, carrying its fulminate in the base 
of the cartridge, has also a great conven- 
ience, and has riveted the former conclusion 
of the greater value of the breech-loader. 

The cartridge was introduced by Gustavus 
Adolphus, who was killed at Lutzen iu 1632. 
It at first only contained the powder, the 
bullets being carried in a bag. The idea of 
using sheet metal for cartridge cases origi- 
nated with the French. In 1826 Cazalat pat- 
ented a metallic cartridge case, drawn from 
a single piece of copper, and having an 
opening in the centre of the base for the 
communication of fire from the fulminate, 



which was covered with water-proof paper. 
Lefaucheux and Flobert, of Paris, improved 
and introduced the metallic cartridge, but 
it has received its final improvements in 
this country, being, in fact, a prominent 
feature in what is known as the American 
system. 

The systems of breech-loading are three : 
the " movement of barrel," the " movement 
of breech block," and the "revolver." Of 
these genera there are thirteen species and 
twenty-six varieties. Of the different modes 
there are about 1050 patents in the United 
States Patent-office, beginning with the pat- 
ent of J. H. Hall, of North Carolina, in 1811, 
for a rising breech block, which slipped from 
behind the bore to allow the cartridge to be 
inserted at the breech. Ten thousand of 
these arms were made for the United States 
government between 1811 and 1839, and some 
of them were captured at the taking of Fort 
Donelson. 

While it is true that the use of breech- 
loaders dates back to the sixteenth century, 
that form of arm being almost as old as the 
muzzle-loader, the actual use of breech-load- 
ers on a large scale in military service, or 
the habitual use of them by sportsmen, is 
quite modern. The Hall gun of 1811, men- 
tioned above, was manufactured on a small 
scale, and appears to have been locked up 
in arsenals, where it was forgotten. The 
needle-gun was introduced into the Prussian 
service to a limited extent in 1846, and into 
the Danish and Norwegian soon afterward. 
The Schleswig - Holstein war was fought 
with needle-guns. The French Chassepot 



100 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



is reputed to have been first used in the 
Italian struggle in the Garibaldi times. 

Previous to our own war of 1861-65 our 
principal breech-loading arms were Sharps's, 
Burnside's, Maynard's, Merrill's, and Spen- 
cer's. The number of breech-loaders pur- 
chased by the United States government be- 
tween January 1, 1861, and January 30, 1866, 
is stated to have been as follows, arms of 
which the purchases were below 10,000 be- 
ing omitted : 



Buraside 55,56T 

Gallagher 22,728 

Joslyn 11,261 

Merrill 14,295 

Maynard 20,002 



Remington 20,000 

Sharps 80,512 

Henry 30,062 

Spencer 94,156 

Starr 25,603 



Some of the above have fallen out of 
public notice ; the Sharps, Maynard, Rem- 
ington and Winchester (known during the 
war as the Henry), Ward-Burton, Colt, and 
Springfield have taken front rank as mili- 
tary and sporting rifles, while the Parker, 
Maynard, and Remington are the prominent 
shot-guns. Reference has been made to the 
American system of assembling the parts, 
which are made interchangeable, and also 
to the development of the system by Colonel 
Colt, in the manufacture of his revolving- 
chambered pistol. The Smith and Wesson 
arm is made by the same process. 

In 1866 Prussia with breech-loaders de- 
feated Austria with muzzle-loaders. A few 
years afterward the Prussian Zundnadelge- 
tvelir and the French Chasscpot struggled for 
pre-eminence on the soil of France. 

It may be added that, with a single ex- 
ception, the main features of all the prom- 
inent military rifles originated in the Unit- 
ed States. The exception is the European 
needle-gun, which is never likely to be used 
here. The English " Martini-Henry" gun is 
but a modification of the American " Pea- 
body." Six hundred thousand of the Mar- 
tini-Henry gun are now being made for the 
Turkish government. The "Winchester 
Repeating Arms Company," of New Haven, 
Connecticut, is making the ammunition for 
these guns. Four thousand tons of lead 
have been cast into bullets for the car- 
tridges, and the boxing costs $100,000. 
These cartridges will freight eight vessels 
of 500 tons each. The first metallic car- 
tridge used in a military arm was that of 
Dr. Edward Maynard. It was a cylindrical 
water-proof cartridge. 



TELEGRAPH. 

When the men of 1776 threw down the 
gage of battle, there were no means of sig- 
naling news other than by such semaphores 
as had existed in one form or another for 
2500 years past, and are yet used by the 
Indians of the plains. Visible signals by 
swinging arms mounted on the tops of masts 
or of elevated buildings signaled the events 
even of Trafalgar and Waterloo along the 
Falmouth and Dover roads to London. In 
a less pretentious way, concerted fires and 
smokes by night or by day were made by 
the nations of antiquity, as recorded by 
Homer and Jeremiah ; by the Highlanders, 
as recounted by Scott ; and by the Indians 
of our Western plains, as lately described 
by General Custer. 

The semaphoric system of Polybius was 
adapted to spell out messages letter by let- 
ter. Signaling by flags and lanterns is em- 
ployed in military and railway practice. 

The electric telegraph preceded the elec- 
tro-magnetic by many decades. Gray, in 
1729, noticed the conductivity of certain 
bodies; Nollet soon after passed a shock 
through 180 men of the French guards, and 
a line 100 toises in length ; Watson observed 
that the transmission of the shock through 
12,000 feet of wire was practically instan- 
taneous, and signaled an observer by this 
means. Then came a number of experi- 
menters, each of whom added something to 
the stock of knowledge on the subject. Le 
Sage, of Geneva (1774), had a wire for each 
letter, and pith-ball electroscopes for the ex- 
cited agents. Lamond (1787) had a single 
wire and concerted movements of the pith 
ball. Cavallo, in 1795, proposed to trans- 
mit letters by combinations of dots and 
spaces. The next year Betancourt con- 
structed a telegraph between Madrid and 
Aranjuez, a distance of twenty-seven miles. 
The messages were read by the divergence 
of pith balls. 

Then came the discoveries of Volta, Gal- 
vani, Oersted, Ampere, Faraday, and Henry. 
The experiments of the first two mentioned 
are at the bottom of the discoveries in dy- 
namic electricity. Oersted, in 1820, ob- 
served that the magnetic needle had a tend- 
ency to assume a direction at right angles 
to that of the excited wire. The farther 
experiments of Oersted and Ampere, and 



TELEGRAPH. 



101 



the discovery of Faraday that magnetism 
was induced in a bar of soft iron under the 
influence of a voltaic circuit, and that of 
Sturgeon, in 1825, that a soft iron bar sur- 
rounded by a helix of wire through which a 
voltaic current is passed is magnetized dur- 
ing the time such current continues, gave 
rise to the first really convenient and prac- 
tical system of electro-telegraphy. One dif- 
ficulty remained — the resistance of the trans- 
mitting wire to the comparatively feeble 
current engendered by the voltaic battery. 
This was overcome by Professor Henry, who, 
in 1831, invented the form of magnet now in 
use, and discovered the principle of combina- 
tion of circuits constituting the receiving mag- 
net and relay, or local battery, as they are fa- 
miliarly known in connection with the Morse 
apparatus. The effect of a combination of 
circuits is to enable a weak or exhausted 
circuit to bring into action and substitute 
for itself a fresh and powerful one. This is 
an essential condition to obtaining useful 
mechanical results from electricity where a 
long circuit of conductors is used. 

In 1832 Professor Morse began to devote 
his attention to the subject of telegraphy, 
and in that year, while on his passage home 
from Europe, he invented the form of tele- 
graph since so well known as " Morse's." 

A short line worked on his plan was set 
up in 1835, though it was not until June 20, 
1840, that he obtained his first patent, and 
nearly four years elapsed before means 
could be procured, which were finally grant- 
ed by the government of the United States, 
to test its practical working over a line of 
any length, though he had as early as 1837 
endeavored to induce Congress to appropri- 
ate a sum of money sufficient to construct a 
bine between Washington and Baltimore. 

Morse's first idea was to employ chemica 1 
agencies for recording the signals, but he 
subsequently abandoned this for an appa- 
ratus which simply marked on strips of pa- 
per the dots and dashes composing his al- 
phabet. The paper itself is now generally 
dispensed with, at least in this country, and 
the signals read by sound — a circumstance 
which conduces to accuracy in transmission, 
as the ear is found less liable to mistake the 
duration and succession of sounds than the 
eye to read a series of marks on paper. 

Professor Morse deserves high honor for 



the ingenious manner in which he availed 
himself of scientific discoveries previously 
made by others, for many important discov- 
eries of his own, and for the courage and 
perseverance which he manifested in en- 
deavoring to render his system of practical 
utility to mankind by bringing it promi- 
nently to the notice of the public, and he 
hived to see it adopted in its essential feat- 
ures throughout the civilized world. 

The attention of Wheatstone in England 
appears to have been drawn to the subject 
of telegraphy in 1834. His first telegraph 
comprised five pointing needles and as many 
line wires, requiring the deflection of two 
of the needles to indicate each letter. His 
first dial instrument was patented in 1840. 
Modifications were, however, subsequently 
made in it. The transmission of messages 
was effected by a wheel having fifteen teeth 
and as many interspaces, each representing 
a letter of the alphabet or a numeral, and 
thirty spokes corresponding to this, and 
forming part of the line. The circuit was 
closed by two diametrically opposite springs 
so arranged that when one was in contact 
with a tooth the other was opposite a space, 
when the transmitter was turned until op- 
posite a particular letter and held there, a 
continuous current being produced, causing 
an index on the indicating-dial at the other 
end of the bine, which had thirty divisions 
corresponding to those of the transmitter, 
to turn until it arrived opposite the letter to 
be indicated. The revolution of the index 
was effected by clock-work, the escapement 
of which was actuated by an electro-magnet 
at either end of a pivoted beam, the ends 
of which carried two soft iron armatures. 
One of the line wires, as well as one of the 
contact springs of the transmitter, and one 
of the electro magnets of the indicator, were 
afterward dispensed with. 

A magneto-electric apparatus was sub- 
sequently substituted for the voltaic bat- 
tery. 

The single-needle telegraph of Cooke and 
Wheatstone is caused to indicate the letters 
and figures by means of the deflections to 
the right or left of a vertical pointer ; for 
instance, the letter A is indicated by two 
deflections to the left, N by two deflections 
to the right, I by three consecutive deflec- 
tions to the right and then one to the left, 



102 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 




MORBE APPARATUS, CIRCUIT AND BATTERY. 




MORSE REGISTER. 



and so on. This is extensively employed in 
Great Britain and India. 

Bain, in 1846, patented the electro-chem- 
ical telegraph, which dispensed with the 
relay magnet at intermediate stations, and 
subsequently Gintl, in Austria, and Bonelli 
constructed telegraphs of this class varying 
in details from that of Bain. 

The above diagram shows the system of 
indicator, relay, local battery, lines, and key. 

The middle figure shows the key, which is 
worked by the sender of the message, and 
the lower figure the register, by which mo- 
tions of the stylus under the excitement 
which renders it temporarily magnetic are 
recorded on the paper in dots or dashes, 
according to the length of time during 
which the circuit is maintained. This is 
the principal instrument in America and 
on the continent of Europe. Room fails 
to tell of the autographic systems of Ca- 
selli and Bonelli ; the printing telegraphs 
of House and Hughes ; the automatic tel- 
egraphs of Edison and others. 

The duplex telegraph, by which messages 
are sent over the same wire in contrary di- 
rections at the same time, is so strange that 




ilil „ 

3IB | 



DUPLEX TELEGRAPH. 



a diagram and short description will be 
given. Several plans of duplex telegraph 
have been proposed. The device selected 
for illustration is that of Stearns, of Boston, 
which is based upon the plan of Gintl, of 
Austria, 1853. The relay, or receiving in- 
strument, is composed of two pairs of elec- 
tro-magnets (m m) acting in opposite direc- 
tions upon a common armature lever (A). 
The key is the armature of an electro-mag- 
net which is in a local circuit controlled by 
a Morse key (E). LB is the local battery. 
The main battery (MB) current is equally 
divided between the relay magnets (m m), 
one-half passing through one set of mag- 
nets to the line I, and the other half passing 
through the other magnets and a rheostat 
(B), equal to the resistance of the main line, 
to earth. The relay magnets are thus equal- 
ly excited, and their influence upon the ar- 
mature neutralized, so that the outgoing 
current gives no signal at the sending sta- 
tion. A current received, however, traverses 
only one set of the electro-magnets, destroy- 
ing the equilibrium, and causing a signal. 
The key is so constructed that it closes one 
circuit to the earth before breaking another, 
thus always preserving the continuity of 
the circuit, a condition essential in systems 
of this kind. A condenser ( C) is placed in a 
shunt circuit to the magnets in the short or 
home circuit, in order to neutralize the ef- 
fect of the extra current on the line mag- 
nets of the relay. 

ELECTROPLATIXG. 

Electroplating is an invention of the cen- 
tury. Volta himself experimented about 
1800. Cruikshank noticed the corrosion in 
one wire and the precipitation of metallic 



ELECTRIC LIGHT. 



103 




ELECTROPLATING. 

silver on the other when passing the " gal- 
vanic influence" through the wires in a bath 
of nitrate of silver. Wollaston experimented 
in 1801. Spencer made casts from coins in 
1838. Jacobi, of Dorpat, soon after gilded 
the iron dome of the Cathedral of St. Isaac, 
at St. Petersburg, with 274 pounds of ducat 
gold, deposited by battery. The art has 
grown into use, and now baser metals, in 
the shape of articles for household service, 
are cased with silver; electrotyped forms 
are used as printing surfaces ; nickel is de- 
posited on numerous articles which are ex- 
posed to damp, and on others to add to their 
beauty, as with movements of watches. It 
is impossible to enumerate the uses and ap- 
plications, and not easy to exaggerate the 
value of the art. 

ELECTRIC LIGHT. 
The electric light is eminently the child of 
the century. In its production and its uses 
it touches nowhere upon the knowledge or 
the methods of the men of the previous pe- 
riods. It is a pure gain of the present. The 
bright spark from the electrical machine had 
been observed by Wall in 1708, the Leyden- 
jar was invented by Cunceus in 1746, and 
the experiments of Dufay, Nollet, Gray, 
Franklin, and others soon gave valuable re- 
sults. Another whole series of observations 
and inventions founded upon the discoveries 
of Volta and Galvani was necessary before 
the transient spark was succeeded by the in- 
tense and unremitting light developed be- 
tween two pieces of carbon placed at the 
positive and negative ends of a voltaic cir- 
cuit. The electricity may be developed ei- 
ther by a battery, or from magnets in con- 
nection with a series of helices arranged 
on a rotating wheel, the latter source be- 
ing preferred for light-houses and in other 
situations where permanency is intended. 
The battery is the usual source for lect- 



ures in theatres having no regular labora- 
tory. 

The electric light was first brought into 
notice by Greener and Staite in 1846, in an 
arrangement by which small lumps of pure 
carbon nearly in contact, and inclosed in air- 
tight vessels, were rendered luminous by cur- 
rents of galvanic electricity. The break in 
the continuity of the circuit at this point 
causes resistance, generating intense heat 
and the consumption of the carbon, which is 
accompanied by an extremely brilliant light. 
As the carbon burns away, one or both of the 
pieces require to be advanced, and the chief 
difficulty was found to be in maintaiuing 
the points at such a distance from each oth- 
er as to render the light continuous. This 
is now effected by means of an electro-mag- 
net and clock movement, the duty of the 
latter being to bring the points together as 
they are gradually consumed, while the 
magnet checks the clock action when not 
desired. 

This light is very largely used in the lect- 
ure-room. It was introduced into Duuge- 




ELEOTEIO LIGHT. 



104 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



ness Light-house, on the southeast coast of 
England, in 1862; at La Heve, France, a 
year or two later. It was used in the ex- 
cavating chamber in the base of the deep 
caissons of the St. Louis Bridge ; during the 
excavation of the docks at Cherbourg ; on 
various festal occasions in cities of America 
and Europe. 

FIRE-ENGINES, ETC. 

In fire-engines America has hardly a rival. 
When our century commenced a clumsy 
hand-engine was employed, a gradual im- 
provement upon the mere syringe which 
was used from the time of Trajan down to 
the sixteenth century. At Augsburg, about 
1518, force-pumps were mounted on wheels 
and worked by levers. At Nuremberg, in 
1657, the town engine had a cistern and 
pump mounted on a sled ; the brakes were 
worked by twenty-eight men, and threw a 
stream through an inch nozzle to a height 
of eighty feet. The Van der Heyden broth- 
ers about this time much improved the de- 
vice. Newsham's engine, about the end of 
the seventeenth century, had the double- 
acting force-pump with air chamber. This 



was not superseded till about 1832, when 
our personal recollections commenced, and 
about that time improvements were rapidly 
made which culminated in the gorgeous 
hand-engines with which we ran, of which 
we boasted, and, lamentable to say, about 
which we fought. 

Steam-power forcing -pumps for extin- 
guishing fires were in use long before port- 
able steam fire-engines. The first steam 
fire-engines were perhaps those mounted 
on barges on the river Thames, and which 
were moved or towed to fires occurring on 
the river front. Next was undoubtedly the 
portable steam-engine of Captain Ericsson. 
This was made in Manchester, England, 
about 1830, a little after he constructed the 
" Novelty" locomotive, which contended for 
the prize on that famous day in 1829 on the 
Liverpool and Manchester Railway. He 
also made a steam fire-engine in New York 
in 1842-43. 

But, after all, the steam fire-engine as a 
fixed and valuable fact hails from Cincin- 
nati, Ohio, where the talents of the brothers 
Latta and Mr. Shawk, inventors and build- 
ers, were seconded by the enterprise of 




STEAM FIRE-ENGINE " WASHINGTON. NO. 1," BROOKLYN, NEW YORK. 



FIKE-ALAKMS. 



105 



Miles Greenwood. The " Citizens' Gift," one 
of the first successful engines, was built in 
1853, and in 1866 was still among the most 
useful of her class. Since that time the 
principal cities of North America have been 
supplied with steam fire-engines ; also many 
of the largest cities of England, and some 
few on the continent of Europe. 

The American system of fire-alarms is like- 
ly to work its way gradually into the cities 
of Europe. It is one of those things which 
are difficult to introduce, and impossible to 
dispense with when once tried. We can 
not imagine such an impertinent and ab- 
surd proposition as to go back to the old 
times when the flames of a burning house 
were the signal to the watchman in the 
tower of the engine-house. 

The fire-alarm telegraph first in use was 
merely a connection by Morse telegraph be- 
tween fire-alarm stations. This was in use 
in New York and Berlin in 1851. The pres- 
ent system is founded upon the patented in- 
vention of Farmer and G'hanning, 1857. Mr. 
Channing wrote upon the subject in 1845, 
and in 1848 Mr. Farmer devised a means of 
ringing bells by electricity, and in an exper- 
imental trial that year the bell in the tower 
of Boston City Hall was rung by an operator 
in New York. The fire-alarm telegraph was 
first put up, in the year 1852, in Boston. 

The primary requisites of a fire-alarm 
telegraph system are a telegraph line, a 
central receiving station, and a number of 
signal boxes suitably distributed for trans- 
mitting an alarm. 

When there are a number of such boxes, 
as in most cities, they are not arranged 
upon the same circuit, but upon several 
circuits connected to some central station. 
The signal boxes generally used contain a 
spring or weight and gearing, rotating a 
circuit-breaking wheel and a fly for regu- 
lating the speed. The circuit wheel in one 
form is provided with projections, upon 
which a spring presses and closes the cir- 
cuit, which is broken as the spring passes 
over the intervals between the cogs ; in 
another form the surface of the wheel is 
smooth, an insulating material being let 
into the wheel so as to break the circuit. 
A train of gearing, upon one shaft of which 
is a cam or lug, operates the pivoted ham- 
mer. This gear is held in rest by the ar- 



mature of a magnet acting as a detent; so 
every time a current passes, the armature 
allows the gearing to revolve, and the ham- 
mer strikes once. At the same time the 
smaller alarm gongs are struck in the en- 
gine-houses. In the houses the horses are 
kept ready harnessed. At the end of the 
halter strap (where halters are used) is a 
ring through which a bolt upon the manger 
passes, securing the horse ; from the bolts a 
string or lever passes to a weight or spring 
kept inactive by the gong-hammer lever; 
the first stroke releases the weight, which, 
falling, pulls the string or lever, withdraw- 
ing all the bolts securing the halters, and 
loosing the horses. When halters are not 
used, but the horses are turned into box- 
stalls, the latter have sliding gates, which 
are raised by the same kind of devices. 

In the strictly automatic system there is 
no operator at the central station, but a re- 
peater of very complex organization, having 
connection with all the various circuits, so 
that, an alarm coming in on any one cir- 
cuit, the repeater is prevented from receiv- 
ing from any other circuit (to avoid inter- 
ference of signals), and caused to repeat 
the alarm automatically upon all the cir- 
cuits, including the various alarm devices. 
A register is also used with the repeater. 

ATMOSPHERIC RAILWAY, ETC. 

The "pneumatic tube and atmospheric railway 
are other achievements of the century. It 
can not be said that they have come into 
extensive use for passengers, but for small 
parcels and letters they have been in suc- 
cessful use for fifteen years in London. 

Dr. Papin, of Blois, in France, suggested 
the idea about the end of the seventeenth 
century, but, like some other children of his 
fertile brain, it never grew up. Medhurst 
in 1810 patented the idea of forcing a car- 
riage on a pair of tracks along an air-tight 
tube by means of compression of air be- 
hind it. 

Vallance in 1824 patented the other mode, 
exhausting the ah- in front of it. The idea 
was carried out at the Sydenham Palace, 
near London, where an ordinary railway 
carriage with a somewhat elastic piston 
traveled in an elliptical tunnel eight by 
nine feet in its minor and major diameters. 
The same idea is earned out in Beach's short 



106 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



tunnel under Broadway, New York, which 
has heen visited by many of our readers. 

Out of this grew the atmospheric railway, 
in which a piston traveling in a tube is con- 
nected to a carriage running upon rails out- 
side, a long valve filling a slot in the top 
of the tube being displaced by a bar de- 
pending from the carriage, and falling into 
place again behind. This plan had many 
modifications, and was actually employed on 
two railways, but afterward abandoned — 
from 1844 to 1855 on the Kingstown and 
Dalkey, Ireland, If miles ; from London to 
Croydon, England, 10 miles. Good speed 
was attained, heavy grades readily ascend- 
ed, collision was impossible, but it was too 
liable to get out of order. 

The atmospheric brake for railway cars is 
another recent feature, and has only at- 
tained its present excellence after many 
attempts. As many as twenty-four patents 
were granted from 1841 to 1865 for brakes 
actuated upon each car by a single impulse 
by the engineer, many of them employing 
air or steam as the means of applying the 
shoes to the car wheels. 

The Westinghouse brake employs air as 
the means of transmitting power to the 
brakes. This is condensed to the required 
extent into a reservoir by a steam-pump 
upon the locomotive. From the reservoir 
it is conducted back beneath the cars of the 
train by pipes connected beneath the train 
by flexible tubes and valved couplings. Un- 
der each car is a cylinder to which the com- 
pressed air is admitted forward of a piston, 
the stem of which is connected to a bell- 
crank attached to the brake levers by rods, 
so that when air is admitted by the en- 
gineer to the pipes connected to the cylin- 
ders under each car, the brakes of each are 
simultaneously applied. 

One test may be mentioned. September 
18, 1869, a train of six cars descending the 
Horseshoe Bend of the Pennsylvania Cen- 
tral Railway, a grade of ninety-six feet to 
the mile, at the rate of thirty miles per hour, 
was brought to a stand-still in 420 feet — 
seven car lengths. 

Blowers and blowing engines are but forms 
of air-compressing or air-exhausting pumps, 
but it is bard to overvalue them. They in- 
crease the draught in metallurgic furnaces ; 
furnish vital air to close and fetid places, 



such as mines, cisterns, holds of ships ; sup- 
ply warmed, cooled, moistened, or medica- 
ted air to public buildings, schools, hos- 
pitals, etc. ; furnish a drying atmosphere to 
lumber and grain kilns and powder mills ; 
assist in evaporating liquids and removing 
the steam from the vicinity of the boiling 
solution; raise liquids on the principle of 
the Giftard injector, as in oil wells and sub- 
aqueous caissons ; assist in the dispersion 
of liquids, as in atomizers and some forms 
of ice machines ; remove dust and chips 
from saw-mills and planers, the fatal dust 
from the stones and glazers of cutlers ; sup- 
ply breath to organs. 

The blower of three centuries since con- 
sisted of one open-ended box slipping into 
another ; it was used for furnaces in that 
very remarkable city, Nuremberg, and was 
an improvement over the ordinary bellows. 
Later, about 1621, a bellows was used con- 
sisting of a valve oscillating in a sector 
chamber. The fan-blower dates from 1729. 
The water-bellows was invented by Horn- 
blower. 

The first powerful blast machines were 
probably those erected by Smeaton at the 
Carron Iron-works, 1760. The furnaces grew 
larger in size, and more powerful blowers 
were needed. Watt's engine came just in 
time to crown the whole affair with success 
and revolutionize the iron trade. Neilson 
invented the hot blast in 1828. 

Power blowers are now used. The forms 
are piston ; fan ; vertical open-ended cylin- 
der plunging in water ; pair of wheels, with 
alternate vanes and packing surfaces, and 
rotating in concert. 

BALLOONS. 

Aerostation is almost all within the centu- 
ry. Since Icarus fell into the ^Egean Sea 
very little advance has been made in flying 
machines, the flight of Daedalus from Crete 
to Sicily being altogether the most success- 
ful on record. Some presume to doubt this. 
Ballooning was rendered possible upon the 
discovery of hydrogen gas by Cavendish in 
1766. It is true it had been produced before, 
but was not understood or used. Dr. Black 
the next year suggested its use for aerosta- 
tion. The brothers Montgolfier ascended 
by a fire balloon in 1783 ; the ascensive 
power was obtained by heated air rising 



GAS. 



107 



from a fire made in the open month of the 
balloon. Pilatre de Roziere and the Mar- 
quis d'Arlaudes repeated the experiment the 
same year. MM. Charles and Robert infla- 
ted their balloon with hydrogen gas, and as- 
cended 9700 feet and reached a distance of 
twenty -five miles in one hour and three- 
quarters. Ascensions after this became fre- 
quent. Pilatre and Romaiu tried to com- 
bine a hydrogen balloon with a fire balloon ; 
the expanding gas reached the fire, the 
whole was consumed, and the aeronauts per- 
ished. Balloons of observation were used 
by the French army at Liege and Fleurus 
in 1794. This was repeated at Solferino in 
1859, and with our Army of the Potomac. 
The most remarkable ascent for a long time 
was that of Gay-Lussac, in 1804, who reached 
the height of 23,040 feet. Glaisber, it is said, 
afterward ascended to a height of seven 
miles. Green, in 1820, introduced the plan 
of inflating with the ordinary illuminating 
gas of the streets. 

The history of the balloon since this time 
embraces many names — Wise, King, Lowe, 
and Donaldson in this country ; Gilford, Go- 
dard, and De Lome in France. M. Godard 
conducted the balloon postal administration 
during the siege of Paris. Wise's trip from 
St. Louis is the longest on record, nearly 1200 
miles. 

WEIGHING MACHESTES. 

Probably no invention, if we except that 
of the locomotive, has to so great a degree 



expedited the transactions of commerce as 
the platform balance, invented by the Fair- 
banks Brothers about 1830. The business 
of making these weighing machines has 
grown to enormous proportions. From the 
Fairbanks manufactory at St. Johnsbury, 
Vermont, 50,000 scales are sent out annual- 
ly to all parts of the world. 

GAS. 

Illuminating gas was unknown, except as 
a surface emanation or a laboratory produc- 
tion, in the year 1776. In China from time 
immemorial the natural flow of carbureted 
hydrogen has been used for lighting, and for 
boiling the brine yielded by salt wells. Sim- 
ilar convenient applications have been made 
at Fredonia, New York, Portland, on Lake 
Erie, Wigan, Scotland, in lighting, and at 
Kanawha, West Virginia, in evaporating 
brine. Gas emanating from a well 1200 feet 
deep is used at the " Siberian Works," Pitts- 
burg, under the boilers and in the puddling 
furnaces. The fire - worshipers of Persia 
have regarded such emanations with high 
respect, and the holy fires of Baku, on the 
Caspian, have a great local fame, and are 
thus maintained. 

Gas was first obtained by the distillation 
of coal in 1688 by Dr. Clayton ; Boyle refers 
to it in that year. Watson, Bishop of Llan- 
daff, 1756, Lord Dundonald, 1786, distilled 
coal and tar and burned the issuing gas. 
Murdoch was the first to light a building 




l'l.VliEAM OF GAS-WORKS. 



108 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



with it. He thus lighted his house and of- 
fices at Redruth, Cornwall, in 1792. In 1798 
he lighted with gas the works of Bonlton 
and Watt at Soho. He illuminated these 
buildings in 1803 in the rejoicings for peace : 
Trafalgar, Austerlitz, and Jena, within four 
years afterward, are a curious commentary. 
Murdock's name stands at the head of the 
list as the man who reduced the idea to 
practice. In 1804-05 he lighted the cotton 
factory of Phillips and Lee, Manchester, 
with a brilliancy estimated to be equal to 
3000 candles. This was a grand success. 

In 1803 Winsor lighted the Lyceum Thea- 
tre, in London, and obtained a patent for 
lighting streets by gas. He established the 
first gas company. The first street lighted 
was one side of Pall Mall, in 1807 ; Westmin- 
ster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament, in 
1813 ; London streets commonly were Ught- 
ed in 1815 ; Paris, the same year ; Baltimore, 
1816; Boston, 1822; New York, 1825. 

This is all very recent, and yet how far 
into the past the dim period of street oil- 
lamps seems to have retreated! The mode 
of making illuminating gas is pretty gen- 
erally understood. The coal is baked in re- 
torts, and the gas flows therefrom in com- 
pany with other vapors, which are removed 
by successive operations. It is conducted 
first to the convoluted pipes of the con- 
denser, by which it is cooled and the tar 
precipitated. Thence it passes to the wash- 
er, where the ammonia is seized by the wa- 
ter, allowing the gas to pass on to the puri- 
fier, where it is deprived of its sulphur and 
carbonic acid by dry lime, or latterly by the 
hydrated sesquioxide of iron. Clegg in- 
vented the purifier and wet meter in 1807 ; 
Malam the dry meter in 1820. 

SILVER. 

The silver processes now adopted in our 
Western Territories are the result of long 
care and observation, with chemical analy- 
ses — the union of experimental test and sci- 
entific deduction. 

Amalgamating pans and barrels are made 
in great variety ; roasting furnaces and 
processes have been adapted to the varying 
characters of ore and the means at command 
for treating. One of the most satisfactory 
of tbe latter must stand as a representative 
of the whole family, as it is not possible to 




stetefeldt's boasting fuenaoe. 

treat the matter either at length or in de- 
tail. 

The Stetefeldt roasting furnace for silver 
ores containing sulphur is what is technical- 
ly known as a shaft furnace ; the ground and 
stamped ore is dusted in a shower into a 
vertical shaft, up which the flame of a fur- 
nace is directed. 

The ground ore is mixed with salt, and 
pulverized at the stamp battery. The pulp 
is carried by a conveyer to the feeder at the 
top of the shaft, and shaken through the 
sieve so as to fall in a shower through the 
flame of the gas entering at the side aper- 
tures low down in the shaft. The principal 
portion falls to the bottom, but the finer 
matter passing over is exposed to a dame 
arising from the mingled air and the car- 
bonic oxide of a charcoal fire discharging 
into the downcast shaft leading to the series 
of chambers in which fine metallic dust is 
eventually deposited, and from which it is 
removed from time to time. 

In the furnace shaft a double decomposi- 
tion takes place, which converts the sulphide 
of silver into the chloride, in which latter 
condition it is brought, as one may say, 
within the grasp of the mercury. In the 
presence of sulphurous gases from the sul- 
phide of silver the chloride of sodium is de- 
composed, and yields its chlorine to the sil- 
ver, forming the chloride of silver, while the 
sulphurous gases uniting with the soda form 
sulphate of soda, which is washed out with 
the tailings. The material from the furnace 
is ready for the amalgamating pan. 



Ice is one thing in which Americans rev- 
el in the summer-time. No other nation 
lays in such a stock, or so peremptorily de- 
mands an abundant supply. American ice 



ICE-MAKING MACHINES. 



109 




FERDINAND CARRE'S CONTINUOUS APPARATUS FOB IOE-MAKING. 



■ ~ ^ ^ ' 



is sold in London, 
Calcutta, and a 
hundred places be- 



tween the two. Usually the ice is "har- 
vested" on ponds or rivers in the North, and 
the business has created a whole set of pe- 
culiar contrivances for scraping off the sur- 
face and removing snow ; sawing the sheet 
into blocks without quite detaching ; split- 
ting them off ; floating them to the hoist ; 
elevating them by endless chains ; delivering 
them to the men who stow them in a solid 
mass occupying the whole interior of the 
barn. 

More specially noticeable, however, are 
the machines for congealing water into ice, 
and which are commencing to work at a 
price below that at which the ice can be 
gathered and transported. 

Speaking in short terms, there are four 
modes of making ice — vaporization, radia- 
tion, liquefaction, and sudden reduction of 
pressure. 

Vaporization in a partial vacuum formed 
the basis of Dr. Cullen's attempts in 1755 ; 
in 1777 Nairne used sulphuric acid to absorb 
the vapor rising from water in an exhausted 
receiver. Edmond Carry's apparatus is on 
this principle, and is used to produce the 
carafes frappe'es so common in Parisian res- 
taurants. In the continuous operation of 
Ferdinand Carre" ammonia is employed as 
being more volatile than water, and under 



ordinary atmospheric pressure permanently 
gaseous. The apparatus is somewhat com- 
plicated, but effective. The water is in cans 
in a bath of uncongealable liquid, cooled 
by zigzag tubes, into which the liquid am- 
monia is conducted to expand, and thereby 
convert the sensible heat of the surround- 
ing bath into latent, due to its assumption 
of the gaseous condition. There are many 
modifications of the vaporization principle, 
but no room to tell of them. 

Liquefaction is another mode, and snow 
and ice are used in connection with salts. 
Combinations of salts are also used. Ma- 
chines are also used in which air is exhaust- 
ed by a steam-engine from a receiver, the 
expansion of liquid into a gaseous condition 
drawing heat from the water sufficient to 
congeal it. 

SUGAR. 

Sugar is mentioned by Dioscorides and 
Pliny as a kind of honey obtained from cane, 
and was introduced into Europe by the 
Arabs. The first mention of it in European 
annals is in the account of Nearchus, who 
commanded the fleet of Alexander. The 
Crusades added to the European knowledge 
of it, and in the twelfth century it was grown 
in Sicily. Thence it was taken to Madeira 
in 1420, and thence to the Canaries, to Bra- 
zil, and to San Domingo in 1506 ; to Barba- 
does from Brazil in 1641. It is a native of 
the East Indies, and its name is from the 



110 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 




MODERN SUGAR PROCESS. 



Sanskrit, sarkara; Persian, schdkar; Hindos- 
tanee, schukur; Arabic, sukkar. Eanda (can- 
dy) is also Sanskrit. 

It was used for many centuries as a vehi- 
cle in medicine before it became an article 
of food. For the refining processes we are 
indebted to the Venetians of the sixteenth 
century. As time passed, the clarification, 
defecation, and crystallization proceeded on 
a gradually improving scale, boiling, set- 
tling, filtering, white of egg, skimming, bone- 
black, etc., being used. Loaf-sugar was first 
made in Venice. 

The vacuum -pan is the invention of 
Charles E. Howard, an English refiner, about 
1813. In this a partial vacuum is obtained 
over the sirup, so that it will boil at a much 
lower temperature. This not merely saves 
fuel, but prevents charring and discolora- 
tion of the sugar. The modes of handling 
the sirup, so to speak, are also much simpli- 
fied and assisted, the cane juice, by means 
of pumps or by gravity, flowing from the 
mill to the filters, to the defecators, to the 




CENTRIFUGAL FILTER. 



filters again, to the vacuum-pan, and to the 
cooler. 

Another very important aid in sugar-mak- 
ing apparatus is the centrifugal filter, pat- 
ented by Hurd, of Massachusetts, 1844. In 
this the magma is placed in a foraminous 
cylinder, and rotated with great rapidity, so 
that the liquid portion — the water and the 
uncrystailizable sugar — is expelled by cen- 
trifugal force, leaving the granulated sugar 
in the cylinder. 

This really beautiful contrivance has since 
been adapted for many purposes as a drainer 
filter, and as a substitute for the clothes- 
wringer. 

PORCELAIN. 

Porcelain, although not finer in texture 
than the Chinese article of many ages back, 
nor of more graceful and agreeable shapes 
than the vases of Etruria and Greece, has, 
as far as we are concerned in the art, made 
almost all its progress within the century 
just passing away. 
Wedgwood's improvements, 1759-70, date 
the commencement of a new era for us, 
although Bottcher was half a century 
earlier, and founded the works of Dres- 
den. The establishment of the porce- 
lain - works at Sevres, in France, was 
somewhat later. In Prussia, Austria, 
Russia, Bavaria, and France the works 
are governmental. Staffordshire, the old 
home of Wedgwood, is the centre of the 
English works, whicli are all private ven- 
tures; the exports being largely to the 
United States. 



GLASS-MAKING. 



Ill 



■tW M 





GLASS-MAKING IN EGYPT, 1500 B.O. 
GLASS. 

Gfass was known in ancient Nineveh, and 
was skillfully worked by the ancient Egyp- 
tians, though it was mostly ornamental, and 
did not probably enter much into the com- 
mon uses of life. Pliny describes the mode 
of making it, and it was used all down 
through the ages to our own time. It is 
ouly within the last three centuries that its 
use has become common. The manufac- 
ture of blown glass was introduced into 
England in 1559 ; plate-glass in 1673. 

Cylinder glass was made for some scores 
of years before it was introduced into En- 
gland in 1846, just in time for the great Ex- 
hibition building of 1851, which was design- 
ed by Sir Joseph Paxton, and roofed with 
cylinder glass made by Chance and Co., of 
Birmingham. 

The process is as follows : The workman 
collects a mass of glass («) around the end 
of his blowing tube, and then distends and 
rounds it by blowing and rolling it on the 
marrer, or flat cast-iron table. The subse- 
quent operations consist iu reheating, blow- 
ing, and swinging, until the diameter and 
then the length of the cylinder required are 
attained, the glass successively assuming 
the forms b c represented in the figure. In 
the fourth stage, where it has assumed a 
conoidal form (d), the point is very thin, 
and the blower, having filled the shell with 
air at a pressure, places it in the furnace, 
when the expansion of the air by heat causes 
the conoid to burst at the apex (e). The 
edge of the hole is then trimmed with shears, 
and enlarged by the pucellas, a peculiar hand 
tool, which resembles a pair of spring sugar- 
tongs with flat jaws. The cylindrical form 



(/) being then perfected, the cylinder is 
ready to be removed from the blowing 
tube, a circular piece of glass coming 
away with the tube, so as to make an 
opening in the other end of the cylinder. 
This separation is effected by a red-hot 
bent iron, in which the cylinder is turned 
round a few times, so as to expand the 
glass at that point (g). A drop of water 
on the heated line makes an instant 
fracture. The cylinder is then split by 
a diamond, or by means similar to that 
which removed the disk from the end (/(). 
Flatting and annealing finish the process. 
These are accomplished in separate fur- 
naces, or apartments heated by the same 
furnace. In the combined form the flatting 
furnace consists of consecutive chambers 
heated by a furnace beneath. The cylinder 
is placed on the heated floor of the flatting 
furnace, with the cracked side uppermost. 
The heat of the furnace causes it to soften 
and spread out, when all the curves and 
lumps are removed by a straight piece of 
wood fastened crosswise at the end of an 
iron handle, and wetted before applying. 
The flatting stone is made very smooth, as 
any inequalities are transferred to the glass. 
The sheet of glass is then pushed into the 




SUCCESSIVE STAGES OF CYLINDER GLASS. 



112 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



annealing chamber, where it is set upon 
edge, and left to cool gradually. 

The operations of making crown and cyl- 
inder glass are exceedingly interesting, and 
have some marked peculiarities. Wonder- 
ful is the command attained by skill over 
the plastic stuff, and in no other art except 
pottery is there such a growth beneath the 
hand of the operator. 

The lower illustration shows the men, 
each one on his platform, one swinging his 
prolonged bulb above his head, another 
blowing and swinging it beneath his feet, 
while a third is observing the operation of 
heating the glass, which he keeps constant- 
ly turning round by means of the rod to 
which it is attached. 

In articles of bijouterie and virtu we have 
nothing to claim of elegance or beauty over 
the Venetians of centuries back. In glass- 
cutting the most interesting of modern in- 
ventions is Tilghman's sand blast, by which 
a stream of sharp sand or emery is directed 
upon glass to drill it, as may be required, 
or to sink a pattern into it, or sink a panel 
around a raised pattern. It is also used for 
drilling stone, and even the hardest varie- 
ties, such as agate and porphyry. 

PAPER. 

As Pliny remarked in the first century of 
our era, " All the usages of civilized life de- 
pend in a remarkable degree upon the em- 
ployment of paper ; at all events, the remem- 
brance of past events." This he said of the 
material obtained by splitting apart the 
successive folds of the papyrus stalk, a reed 
growing plentifully then in the marshy 
grounds of Egypt, but which is now some- 
what rare. 

Paper, as we understand it, was not then 
known to the Mediterranean nations, and 
perhaps not out of China. Paper made by 
the maceration of rags was introduced into 
Europe by the Spanish Saracens during the 
eighth century. It was, of course, made by 
hand, as it is in Asia at present. 

All paper-making machinery is included 
within our century. By the hand process 
the rags, being sorted, washed, and bleach- 
ed, are cut in pieces, and then ground or 
beaten to a pulp. This was done in mortars 
till the invention of the rag engine in Hol- 
land, about the middle of the seventeenth 




PULPING ENGINE. 

century. As now practiced, the beater or 
pulping engine grinds the rags into pulp, 
which is transferred to a vat. 

By the hand process, which is extinct in 
Europe and America, except for some grades 
of drawing and writing papers, the paper- 
maker dips into the vat a shallow triangular 
frame, known as the mould, having a closely 
woven wire-cloth, a sort of flat sieve with 
wire meshes. Lying upon this is an open 
rectangular frame like a slate frame, and 
known as a deckle, which forms a margin for 
the sheet of paper to be made. He dips the 
two into the pulp, and withdraws them in 
horizontal position, the mould being full. 
The water drips away as the man shakes 
the mould to felt the fibres, and he transfers 
the soft sheet to a sheet of felt, over which 
he lays another sheet of felt, on this a sec- 
ond sheet of moulded pulp, and so on, until 
the pile is high enough to be pressed. It is 
a second time piled, without the felt sheets, 
and again pressed, then sized, calendered, 
and made into reams. 

Ten centuries passed and saw the civil- 
ized nations of the* world making paper thus. 

A few years after the commencement of 
our century, Robert, a Frenchman, devised 
a machine for making a web of paper from 
pulp. Before 1800 he had made it succeed 
in a degree, but it took a number of years 
and the brains of many co-workers before 
valuable results were attained. The scene 
of the effort was shifted from the paper mill 
of Francois Didot, of Essones, France, to the 
works of the wealthy brothers Fomdrinier, 
in England, who were assisted by Donkin in 
bringing the machine to perfection. 

In the Fourdrinier or flat web machine the 
previously prepared pulp is introduced into 
a vat, where it is thinned with water pre- 
viously expressed from the sheet during its 
formation, and agitated by means of a ro- 
tary stirrer. Passing through a peculiarly 
formed strainer, the invention of Ibbotson, 
by which it is freed from knots, the pulp, in 
a stream the thickness of which is regulated 



INDIA RUBBER. 



113 



according to that of the paper to be made, 
falls upon an apron, which conducts it a 
short distance to an endless wire-gauze flat 
web, by which it is carried forward and over 
a box partially exhausted of air ; this flat- 
tens the web of paper, and partially extracts 
the water. The width of the sheet is gov- 
erned by traveling deckles or side straps, 
which prevent any portion of the pulp from 
passing away at the sides of the wire-gauze. 
The web is then conducted upon endless 
blankets between two sets of rollers, which 
express most of the remaining water, and 
partially obliterate the marks of the wire- 
gauze, and dried by passing between several 
pairs of hollow steam-heated rollers, being 
finally wound upon a roller at the farther 
end of the machine, or delivered on to anoth- 
er machine by which it is cut into lengths. 

In 1809 Mr. Dickinson, an English paper 
manufacturer, invented the cylinder machine. 

In this a hollow brass cylinder perforated 
with holes and covered with wire-gauze is 
substituted for the flat web of the Fourdri- 
nier machine. The air is partially exhaust- 
ed from the cylinder through its hollow jour- 
nals, producing the same effect as the vacu- 
um box over which the web passes in the 
Fourdrinier machine. The remaining part 
of the process of manufacture is very simi- 
lar in each. Combinations of the two sys- 
tems are found : a web of cylinder paper, 
which is strongest in one direction, and one 
of Fourdrinier paper beiug united ; also a 
number of webs united before drying to 
form a heavy paper or card - board ; or a 
fine web of pulp has fibres of silk strewed 
upon it to be imbedded in the paper to form 
a paper for fractional currency. The qual- 
ity of paper depends mainly upon that of 
the material, though the making is respon- 
sible for the evenness of its thickness and 
the smoothness of its surface. The best 
quality made in this country is hardly so 
good as that made from the longer fibres of 
silk or broussonetia by the Chinese ; but our 
best is from new — that is, unworn — linen 
stocks, the clippings of garment making. 
Cotton rags are not so good, and old, worn 
rags, partly rotten, are worse. After this we 
reach still commoner material for stout 
brown paper, such as hemp and old rope, 
and the cheapest of all is straw, for wrap- 
ping paper. 

8 



INDIA RUBBER. 

What would the men before '76 have said 
to the India rubber manufacture ? The sub- 
stance was first brought to England from Bra- 
zil as a curiosity early in the eighteenth cen- 
tury, and about 1776 it seems that Priestley 
suggested that it was " excellently adapted 
for removing pencil marks from paper." It 
was dissolved in turpentine, and used by 
Peal in 1791 as water-proofing composition 
for fabrics. Hancock and Mackintosh, about 
1823, were the first to apply the gum to the 
uses of water -proof clothing. The gum 
was placed between two thicknesses of fab- 
ric, and was a sticky affair at the best. The 
business never really prospered until the 
discovery of the vulcanizing process by Good- 
year, the subject of his patent of June 15, 
1844. He preferred the proportions of twen- 
ty-five caoutchouc, five sulphur, seven white 
lead; but these quantities and the nature 
of the substances employed were varied by 
Goodyear himself and by his successors. The 
same may be said of the heat employed in 
combining the substances, this beiug gener- 
ally proportionate to the degree of hardness 
required in the vulcanite. 

The history of invention does not furnish 
an instance of greater persistence under dis- 
couragement than is afforded by the strug- 
gles of Charles Goodyear. It was a purely 
tentative process. He first mixed the gum 
with half its weight of magnesia to dry it 
and remove the stickiness ; but the com- 
pound softened. He then tried India rub- 
ber sap with magnesia, with better results. 
Next he tried surface treatment with nitric 
acid. This scheme, which seemed promis- 
ing, was overthrown by the financial crisis 
of 1837. After a number of attempts, Good- 
year shifted on to the line previously trav- 
eled by Hayward — the use of sulphur. Hay- 
ward had mixed and covered the rubber 
with sulphur, and exposed it to the sun's 
rays, producing a superficial hardening. 
While experimenting with some goods which 
had been thus made and returned as rotten, 
a piece of it was charred by contact Avith 
the stove, and the result was sufficient to 
indicate to the alert mind of Goodyear that 
what was needed was the baking of the 
rubber and sulphur together. He then de- 
voted himself to details, the proper propor- 
tions for given qualities of goods, the mate 



114 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



rials to be added to give color and solidity, 
the uses to which this admirable compound 
may be put. The results of his genius, care, 
and persistence are all around us. 

METEOROLOGICAL INSTRUMENTS. 

The meteorological instruments of the pres- 
ent day derive much of their public interest 
from the tri-daily report of the numerous 
stations to the Signal-office in Washington, 
where the generalizations are made, and 
from whence conjectures for the following 
twenty-four hours are transmitted. The 
principal instruments are the anemometer, for 
direction and rate of the wind ; the barome- 
ter, for the atmospheric pressure ; the ther- 
mometer, for atmospheric temperature. 

Weather-cocks for indicating the direction 
of the wind are as old as the sailing of boats, 
but an instrument for measuring its force 
can be hardly said to have existed before 
1776, when Lind invented an anemometer, 
which has been long since superseded by 
those of Whewell, Ostler, Robinson, and oth- 
ers. The present anemometers are self-re- 
cording. The barograph, or registering ba- 
rometer, used at the Chief Signal-office, War 
Department, Washington, is shown in the 
figure. The barometer is in a dark case, 
with the mercury column exposed at a slit 



through which the light of a lamp passes. 
At the farther end of the machine, shown at 
the left in the cut, is a cylinder wrapped 
with sensitized paper so as to blacken with 
light. This cylinder and its paper cover are 
moved by clock-work so as to rotate once in 
forty-eight hours. The image of that part 
of the slit above the mercurial column is 
thus caused to form a continuous dark band 
of irregular width on the paper, becoming 
narrower as the mercury rises and widen- 
ing as it descends in the tube, the width of 
the band indicating not only the relative 
changes, but also the absolute height of the 
barometer. A shutter operated by the clock- 
work cuts off the light for four minutes at 
the end of each second hour, leaving a ver- 
tical white line on the paper. 

By the expansion of a zinc rod on each 
side of the barometer tube, in connection 
with a glass rod and lever, the thermometric 
changes are made, and the true barometric 
indications, with corrections for tempera- 
ture, are photographically recorded. The 
strip after remaining forty-eight hours is 
taken off, the unaltered nitrate washed 
out, and it is filed away, an enduring rec- 
ord of the condition of the barometer for 
two days. 

The thermometers are read three times a 




THE IiATCOGRAI U. 



ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. 



115 




OONDELL B ARTIFICIAL ARM. 

(Longitudinal section of left arm.) 



day, but may be made similarly self-record- 
ing. Maximum and minimum thermometers 
are a usual furnishing of observatories. The 
differential thermometer of Leslie is a hy- 
grometrical instrument for ascertaining the 
degree of aqueous saturation of the atmos- 
phere by means of the dew-point. 

ANESTHETICS. 

The use of anaesthetics has been brought 
to system, and new agents of ascertained 
strength and effect have been devised. For- 
mer ages used stupefying drugs and poisons 
which struck directly at the vital force. 
Cannabis indica was used in the Orient, man- 
dragora by the Greeks and Romans. The 
modern anaesthetic agents are cold, deutox- 
ide of nitrogen, chloroform, ether, hydrate 
of chloral, and some others of less note. 
From the times when Morelli, in 1674, at the 
siege of Besancon, invented the tourniquet, 
andPere" (1550) introduced the ligature and 
dispensed with actual cautery to arrest the 
bleeding of the stump, no such act has been 
accomplished for maimed humanity as the 
introduction of a safe anaesthetic. As 
Charles IX. said when he hid the Hugue- 
not surgeon in his royal chamber to guard 
him from the assassins on the night of St. 
Bartholomew, " there is only one PereV' 
Palissy, another Huguenot, was similarly 
shielded by Catherine de Medicis, the 
queen - dowager, as there was " only one 
potter." Palissy died in prison eventually. 
Ether was known for many centuries before 
Drs. Morton and Jackson, of Boston, brought 
it into notice as an anaesthetic in 1846. Chlo- 
roform was discovered in 1831 ; first used as 
an anaesthetic by Dr. Simpson, of Edinburgh, 
in 1847. 

ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. 
Artificial limbs and other prosthetic appli- 
ances have advanced with the line — artificial 
hands and legs whose simulation of the nat- 



ural is so close that a casual observer will 
not notice the difference. 

The artificial arm illustrated has three 
motions derived from the stump, the arm 
being secured by bands to the body. The 
forward motion of the stump flexes the fore- 
arm, the phalanges are closed and opened by 
a sort of rotative motion which draws upon 
a cord, and the backward motion of the 
stump gives extension to the fore-arm. A 
man with only four inches of stump may 
with this arm take his handkerchief from 
his pocket, wipe his nose, pick up a marble 
from the table, and put it in his pocket. 
It does not take as long to learn the use of 
it as it does to become accustomed to the 
natural arm; but then the practice with 
the latter begins with very early life, and 
when the use is acquired it is much the 
better of the two. 

Artificial arms, ears, eyes, feet, gums, 
hands, legs, noses, palates, pupils, and teeth 
are all to be purchased closely matching the 
remaining parts, or made to any shape de- 
sired in cases where no natural portion re- 
mains to protest against want of uniform- 
ity. 

Mechanical dentistry is one of the tri- 
umphs of our time and country. Not only 
is excellence in the art a very recent achieve- 
ment, but it is more thoroughly understood 
here than elsewhere. Pepys's diary records 
that his wife's " tooth was new done by La 
Roche, and was indeed pretty handsome," 
but it was probably a piece of ivory or wal- 
rus tooth. 

AQUARIA. 

Aquaria have been constructed on a scale 
sufficient to show aquatic animals and 
plants in their natural condition, and with 
a reasonable degree of freedom. The mode 
of aerating the water by a jet of air intro- 
duced into and ascending in bubbles through 
the water has much simplified that part of 



116 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



the matter. The proper understanding of 
the reciprocal duties and effects of the ani- 
mal and vegetable tenants lies at the bot- 
tom of the success with an aquarium. The 
office of the flora is to abstract the excess 
of carbonic acid gas due to the breathing of 
the fauna, and restore the oxygen, as with 
the terrestrial flora. Then certain animals 
which feed on decaying vegetable matter 
are put in the miniature pond to act as scav- 
engers to the community. The demonstra- 
tion of these conditions is due to R. War- 
rington, 1850. N. B. Ward is also not to be 
forgotten. An aquarium 36 by 150 feet was 
constructed in 1860 in the Jardin d' Acclima- 
tion in Paris by Lloyd. The same person 
erected a large one at Hamburg. An aqua- 
rium at Manchester, England, has 750 feet 
frontage. The aquarium of the Paris Ex- 
position was a large and effective one. That 
of Brighton is on a grander scale than any 
other. It occupies ground 100 by 715 feet, 
the general structure being a quadrangular 
series of tanks with plate-glass sides, and a 
central roofed apartment lighted through 
the tank sides so as to give the idea of be- 
ing under water. The tanks have fresh or 
salt water to suit the tenants, and vary in 
size from 11 by 20 to 30 by 55 feet. 

An aquarium car lately went from New 
England to San Francisco with young fish 
for stocking the Pacific rivers. 

MATCHES. 

The old-fashioned match was simply a 
wooden splint dipped in brimstone, and kin- 
dled from a piece of tinder set on fire by a 
spark from the flint and steel. 

The tinder was sometimes ignited by an 
air-compressing pump. In other cases the 
matches were tipped with chlorate of pot- 
ash, and set on fire by plunging in a vial 
containing asbestus saturated with sulphu- 
ric acid. Dobereiner's lamp, in which a hy- 
drogen jet is brought in contact with plati- 
num sponge, and a coil of platinum wire 
kept red-hot by alcohol, were also sometimes 
employed, rather, however, as curiosities 
than devices of general practical use. 

Lucifer-matches have now superseded all 
other appliances for producing an instanta- 
neous light, throughout the civilized world 
at least, and have become an article of 
manufacture employing an enormous capi- 



tal. They are made by sawing or splitting 
blocks of soft wood into splints, which are 
dipped into a composition containing either 
phosphorus or chlorate of potash as a basis, 
and dried. 

Eound matches are made by forcing the 
splints through plates having circular aper- 
tures, which at once cut out and compress 
them ; the machinery employed cuts as many 
as 30,000 splints per minute. These are sold 
by the hogshead to those who make a spe- 
cial business of applying the composition, 
which is also effected by machinery. 

MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. 

Musical instruments should not be over- 
looked. They have advanced within the 
century equally with the other subjects 
stated. 

The organ is as old as Ctesibus of Alexan- 
dria, who lived in the Ptolemaic period. 
The pressure of air was obtained by a sort 
of water-bellows, the pipes were but very 
few, and the compass of course quite limit- 
ed. Down through the ages we find that it 
had a precarious existence. Haroun-al-Ras- 
chid and the excellent Gerbert of Rheims 
are two of the great names associated with 
its possession and use. The missals of the 
Middle Ages show a variety of clumsy con- 
trivances for evoking sounds from pipes by 
machinery, but excellence was not attained 
much before the time of Father Smith (re- 
ferred to by Pepys), who crossed the Chan- 
nel to repair the damages occasioned in the 
English churches by the Parliamentary sol- 
diers. Since this time the instrument has 
been much enlarged, its power, compass, and 
capacity increased, perhaps without increas- 
ing its sweetness. The great organ of Haar- 
lem has sixty stops and 8000 pipes ; one at 
Seville 5300 pipes. The organ of the " Al- 
bert Hall of Arts and Sciences," London, has 
111 stops, 14 couplers, 32 combinations, and 
about 9000 pipes. The organs of the Bos- 
ton Music-Hall, Baltimore Cathedral, and 
Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, are among the 
largest in this country. 

The parlor organ is an outgrowth of the 
accordeon, which was introduced in Europe 
in 1821. The first metallic-reed musical in- 
strument was the EoJodlcon, by Eschenberg, 
of Bohemia, 1810. The rocking melodeon 
was a large accordeon on a stand. Carhart, 



PRINTING. 



117 



in this country, has done more than any one 
else in the improvement of this instrument. 
He introduced the exhaust plan in 1846. 
Previous to this the air had heen forced 
through the reed slits, and is still so in Eu- 
rope. His first instrument had four octaves, 
but they were afterward increased. Mason 
and Hamlin in 1855 had instruments with 
seven octaves, four sets of reeds, and two 
manuals. 

The piano is the successor of a whole se- 
ries of stringed instruments, dating from 
the harp. It is a prostrate harp, whose 
strings are beaten by hammers actuated by 
keys. The citole, clavicymbalum, virginal, 
spinet, and harpsichord occupy the period 
from the fourteenth to the eighteenth cen- 
tury. The piano-forte was really invented 
by Christofori, of Florence, 1711, but it was 
near the end of the century before it had 
attained excellence enough to supersede the 
spinet and harpsichord, the strings of which 
were twanged by plectra. The grand point 
to be attained in the piano, or as it was ear- 
ly called, the hammer harpsichord, was for the 
hammer to fall back immediately after strik- 
ing the string, so as to allow the latter free 
vibration. 

The improvements in this instrument are 
marvelous, and our country is in the front 
rank of ingenuity and excellence. The 
names of Broadwood, Collard, Erard, Stein- 
way, Chickering, Knabe, with many others 
we can not find space to name, go to an ad- 
miring posterity in company. 

PRINTING. 

The art of taking an impression from an 
inked stamp is of great antiquity, being 
found in the most ancient Egyptian and 
Assyrian remains. Of yore the rude king 
who smeared his hand with red ochre or the 
soot from a burning lamp, and then made 
the impression of his palm and digits be- 
neath a grant of land, was a printer in his 
way in thus putting his hand to the docu- 
ment. Then came seals, engraved in relief 
or intaglio, and delivering an impression of 
the design upon bark, leaf, or skin, either 
white marks on a dark ground or dark on a 
light ground, according to the character of 
the engraving. Seals containing the pro- 
nomeus of the Pharaohs, each in its car- 
touch, rewarded the early explorers in the 



valley of the Nile, and more lately the 
stamps and tablets of the recorders of the 
cities of Mesopotamia have been disinterred 
by thousands. The impressions, having been 
made in plastic clay, and then baked, have 
endured without injury a sepulture of twen- 
ty-five centuries. They exhibit the kindred 
arts of engraving and plastic moulding. It 
may be safely assumed that they were also 
used for giving printed impressions, but 
such memorials are, in the nature of the 
case, less permanent. Some of the ancient 
stamps in the British Museum are of bronze, 
and have reversed raised letters, evidently 
intended to print on bark, papyrus, linen, or 
parchment. 

To this stage of progress various nations 
of the world had advanced, and yet it can 
hardly be said that printing, as we under- 
stand the word, had been thought of. This 
evidently originated in China, but it is not 
certain that Europe derived it from thence. 
The first notice that we find of printing is 
in the Chinese annals. Du Halde cites the 
following from the pen of the celebrated 
Emperor Van Vong, who flourished 1120 
years before Christ. This was about the 
time of Samuel the prophet, and a little be- 
fore Codrus, the last of the Athenian kings. 

" As the stone 'Me' [ink, in Chinese], which is used 
to blacken the engraved characters, can never become 
white, so a heart blackened by vice will ever retain its 
blackness." 

Other Catholic missionaries concur with 
Du Halde in supposing printing from blocks 
to have been invented at least as early as 
930 to 950 b.c. The plan adopted was to 
take a block of pear-tree wood, squared to 
the dimensions of two pages of the work. 
On the smooth surface of the block the 
written pages are inverted, and the paper 
rubbed off, leaving the ink on the block, 
which is then delivered to the engraver, 
who cuts away all the parts not inked. No 
press is used, but the surface being inked 
by one brush, the paper is laid upon the 
block and dabbed down by a dry brush ; 
the sheet is lifted, carrying the ink with it, 
and is folded with the blank sides in, one 
side only being printed ; the folded edge be- 
ing outward, the Chinese or Japanese book 
looks like one with uncut leaves. The first 
four books of Kung-fu-tze (Confucius) were 
thus printed between 890 and 925 a.d., and 



118 



MECHANICAL PROGEESS. 




M/Jff^EIEQir 

m 



" /wv~* ^vwv^. wT^y 

III I I • A. A 



© 



/// I I » I I • 






... * ^ 

&a£ (woman) Lisan (tongue) Umman (army) 

JSar Bab - ilu - ra - Tci as-ri ka- an - su. 
Xing of Babylon lord- paramount. 



SH N 

■ Till] 



WWWN.A 



L B 3> S' 

<Z> ^\ Hieroglyplic. 

^ ~-? l_^ Q, C5, Hieratic. 

\/\j \sj I £. £± Phoenician. 

EGYPTIAN AND CUNEIFORM, IDEOGRAPHIC AND SYLLABIC. 

the description equally applies to the mode 
yet practiced. 

The same system -was used in Europe in 
the thirteenth century for printing playing- 
cards and ornamenting fabrics ; later, the 
works known as block books, each page be- 
ing an engraved block like those of the Chi- 
nese. Such was the Biblia Pauperum, one of 
the earliest of European block books, com- 
piled by Bonaventura, the chief of the Fran- 
ciscans, in 1260. In manuscript form, as a 
book of forty or fifty pages of illustrated 
Bible scenes and passages, this Poor Man's 
Bible was a favorite for five centuries. It 
was printed as a block book about A.D. 1400. 
The Speculum Humana Salvationis of Roster, 
of Haarlem, to whom the credit of the in- 
vention of printing has been hence ascribed, 
was also a block book. Volumes by the score 
have been written on the rival claims of the 



cities of Mentz and Haarlem to the inven- 
tion of printing. From a careful examina- 
tion of. the subject it would appear that 
Mentz has the prior right, and that the gen- 
eral verdict in favor of Gutenberg is cor- 
rect. 

About the year 1041, a period wben Ed- 
ward the Confessor was King of England, 
another forward step was made in China. 
A blacksmith named Pi-Ching invented a 
mode of printing from plates formed from 
movable types, each of which represented a 
word. The types were about the thickness 
of a half dollar, each had a word on its 
face, and they were arranged in order on a 
backing plate, to which they were attached 
by mastic. 

The Chinese have never advanced beyond 
ideographs, or word signs, in which arbitrary 
symbols (d) are made to represent things, 
qualities, or actions. The language has no 
elasticity, and, like the Egyptian hieroglyph- 
ics (« b), is incapable of fulfilling modern re- 
quirements. In this respect it is like the 
ancient Scythic cuneiform (e) ; but the gen- 
ius of the Mesopotamian nations could not 
be thus cramped, and the language gradu- 
ally took on the syllabic form : the cunei- 
form of the second period (shown in /) is a 
transition form. The Persian cuneiform was 
substantially syllabic. Other languages of 
Asia early assumed the phonetic form, in 
which signs stood for sounds, though it was 
many ages before the vowels were written 
definitely. The Phoenician (/<), which is the 
basis of all the principal alphabets of Eu- 
rope, had its twenty-two letters 700 B.C., 
when the black basalt stone was used to 
celebrate the successes of the King of Moab. 
i is a portion of the inscription in hiero- 
glyphic and demotic from the Rosetta Stone. 

That which the Chinese were incapable of 
doing, from the nature of the case, was done 
by John Gutenberg, who was born in 1400, 
at Mentz. In company with Faust and 
others he printed several works with wood- 
en types and wooden blocks : the Alexandri 
Galli Doctrinale and Petri Hispani Tractatm 
in 1442 ; and subsequently the Tabula Alpha- 
betica, Catholicon Donati Grammatiea, and the 
Confessional in. In 1450 the Bible of 637 
leaves was printed by Gutenberg and Faust 
with cut metallic types. Faust retired from 
partnership with Gutenberg in 1455 and be- 



EARLY PROGRESS IN PRINTING. 



119 



came allied with Schoeffer, and they 
published in 1457 the Codex Psalmorum 
with cut metallic types ; the Burandi 
Rationale, published by them in 1459, 
was the first work printed with cast 
metal types. Gutenberg took other 
partners, and published the Catholicon 
Jo. de Janua in 1460. He used none 
but wooden or cut metal types till the 
year 1462. Gutenberg died in high 
honor in the year 1468. 

Peter Schoeffer, of Gernsheim, the 
partner of Faust and former workman 
of Gutenberg, was the inventor of cast 
types, the greatest invention of any of 
the series. 

It may be mentioned that, in the 
early stages of the art, sheets were 
printed but on one side, and the backs 
of the pages pasted together. The 
pages were without running title, run- 
ning folio, or direction word. The 
forms were usually folios, sometimes 
quartos. The character was a rude 
Gothic mixed with an engrossing char- 
acter, and designed to imitate hand- 
writing. Scarcely any division was 
made between words ; the orthogra- 
phy was arbitrary and irregular; ab- 
breviations, in imitation of cursive 
writing, were numerous ; punctuation 
was confined to a double dot (:) or a 
single one (.), afterward a stroke (/), 
known as a virgule, was used for a 
slighter pause, and grew into a com- 
ma (,). Capitals were so sparingly 
employed that the beginning of sen- 
tences and proper names of men and places 
were not thus distinguished. This honor 
was reserved for paragraphs, and here the 
space was left vacant by the printer that 
the illuminated capitals might be put in by 
hand. 

This was soon changed. The era of Leo- 
nardo da Vinci, Albert Diirer, Raphael, 
Michael Angelo, and Vandyck, of Benven- 
uto Cellini, Galileo, Kepler, Shakspeare, 
and Bacon, could not long endure medi- 
ocrity. The type-founders and printers 
were worthy of the occasion, and their work 
leaves little to be desired on the score of 
sharpness and color. The letters of their 
books have a vivid blackness that makes 
one who takes an occasional excursion into 






D^a nin3!pzr)3Tis "DiQ u'wn dtiV 



;*f*A-j3't/t-??-w<s/?-(npw23-A-m'tei<7w* 



O-Li-a )fr\»t _Lj pi. -A, ,_£ [cK\\ 



it ivWt OT^ ?Vi\.y 






PHONETIC LANGUAGES OF ASIA. 

a, Sanskrit. I, Hebrew, c, Samaritan, d, Syriac. e, Syrio- 
Chaldaic. /, Arabic. 







■Egypt 



^yx^'ASL B)\\^Bvu\jy 



writing 



hard of stone I a column | On 



PnOJNIOIAN AND EGYPTIAN WHITING. 

h, Moabite Stone, i, Kosetta Stone. 

black-letter wonder where they obtained their 
ink. The color of our pages is gray and rusty 
in comparison. 

In celebrating the achievements of the 
century we will not claim that we print 
better, but we do it more easily and much 
faster ; while we handle with great appre- 
ciation and respect the works of our worthy, 
patient, and persevering predecessors, they 
would view with admiration mixed with 
awe the towering structure of Hoe, or the 
compact perfecting presses which print from 
a web of paper from one to three miles long, 
and deliver in piles at the rate of 12,000 per 
hour. They might think, as the doctors of 
Paris did of Faust, when they considered, 
from the cheapness of his books and the ex- 



120 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



act correspondence of their pages, that he 
was in league with the Evil One. 

The art of printing was scattered over 
Europe when the city of Mentz was taken 
and plundered by Archbishop Adolphus, of 
Nassaii, in 1462. Within the next decade 
the Caxton press was set up at Westminster, 
and that of Theobaldus Manutius at Venice. 
vEsop's Fables, by Caxton, is supposed to 
have been the first book with its leaves 
numbered. 

Italic, Greek, Roman, and Hebrew fonts 
were cast, letters were pruued of their irreg- 
ularities and excrescences, and order was 
gradually introduced and concurred in. 

The Aldine classics are celebrated in prose 
and verse ; in the latter by Alexander Pope 
among others. The Aldine " Livy" was per- 
haps the first perfect book, as a modern 
printer might say. This press was in the 
hands of the descendants of Aldus for nearly 
a century. 

Catch-words at the foot of the page were 
first used in Venice by Vindeline di Spori. 
They have but lately been abolished. Sig- 
natures to sheets were used by Zorat at Mi- 
lan in 1470. 

A new light dawned upon the nations of 
Europe. The avidity with which the pages 
of the printer were seized and read shows 
that an unsuspected yearniug for knowledge 
possessed the minds of the people. From 
this time the current was uncontrollable, 
and the refuges of lies being undermined, 
commenced to totter and fall, and some oth- 
ers are yet toppling and falling from time to 
time. 

Germany had taken the lead in the inven- 
tion of printing, as it did seventy- seven 
years afterward, when the deputies of thir- 
teen imperial towns protested against the de- 
cree of the Diet of Spires. The previous at- 
tempts at reform in England and Bohemia 
were before the invention of printing, and, 
though not fruitless, were apparently quell- 
ed. Italy during the Renaissance, at the 
beginning of the sixteenth century, was the 
home of arts and letters. Of the various 
cilit ions of books published in the sixteenth 
century one-half were Italian, and one-half 
of these Venetian. One-seventeenth were 
English. 

At Venice was printed the first newspaper, 
the Gazette de Venise, about 15G3, during the 



war with the Turks; the Gazette de France 
appeared in April, 1G31 ; the London Gazette 
in 1642 ; the Dublin News-Letter, 1685 ; the 
Boston News-Letter, 1704 ; the first German 
newspaper, 1715 ; the first in Philadelphia, 
1719 ; in Holland, 1732. The growth, mis- 
sion, and power of the press are to be consid- 
ered elsewhere. 

The first press in America was in Mexico. 
The Manual for Adults was printed on it 
about 1550, by Juan Crornberger, who was 
probably the first printer in America. The 
second press was at Lima, in 1586. The 
press at Cambridge, Massachusetts, was es- 
tablished in January, 1639, by Stephen Daye. 
The college was censor till 1662, when licens- 
ers were appointed. In 1755 the press was 
free. A psalter in the English and Indian 
languages was printed upon this, 1709. The 
press still prospers as the " University Press." 

Printing-presses were established at New 
London, Connecticut, in 1709 ; Annapolis, 
Maryland, 1726 ; Williamsburg, Virginia, 
1729; Charleston, South Carolina, 1730; 
Newport, Rhode Island, 1732 ; Halifax, Nova 
Scotia, 1751 ; Woodbridge, New Jersey, 1752; 
Newbern, North Carolina, 1755 ; Portsmouth, 
New Hampshire, 1756; Savannah, Georgia, 
1763 ; Quebec, Canada, 1764. The first press 
west of the Alleghanies was at Cincinnati, 
1793 ; w T est of the Mississippi, at St. Louis, 
1808. 

TYPE. 

The fonts of the earlier printers, as we 
have said, had a quaint old Gothic charac- 
ter, with various curious tails and inflec- 
tions, in imitation of the secretary hand of 
the period. Schoeffer took the best hand- 
writing of his time for his model. The let- 
ters gradually became more formal and com- 
pact, with fewer exuberances of flourish and 
abbreviations. It was some time before Ital- 
ian taste triumphed over German quaint- 
ness ; but the change was made with more 
speed than one might suppose would have 
been the case, considering what a close cor- 
poration it was that owned the art of print- 
ing in the tight little city, with its tall 
houses, dark, narrow streets, and its strong- 
ly built bastioned walls frowning upon the 
River Rhine and the adjacent hill. When 
the archbishop with weapons of this world 
scattered the coterie of printers it was like 
the sending forth of the foxes and fire- 



TYPE. 



121 



brands of Samson, which carried conflagra- 
tion into the fields of the Philistines. 

In 1465 Schweynheym and Pannartz, who 
printed first at Subiaco, and afterward at 
Rome, introduced a new type, very closely 
resembling Roman. It was professedly de- 
rived from the best handwriting of the age 
of Augustus ; and in their Commentary of Be 
Lyra on the Bible, 1471, are to be found the 
first Greek types worthy of the name. Su- 
biaco was the first place in Italy where print- 
ing was practiced. In 1468 Ginther Zainer 
printed at Augsburg the first book in Ger- 
many with Roman type. 

Roman letters were first used in England 
by Wynkyn de Worde, Caxton's foreman and 
successor. He employed them for distin- 
guishing remarkable words or passages, as 
is now done with Balic. 

Theobaldus Manutius (Aldus) introduced 
the Balic about 1476 : this is believed to 
have been imitated from the handwriting 
of Petrarch. This type was first known as 
Venetian; by the Germans as Cursive. The 
first book printed in Italic was in 1501, with 
ike title, Virgil ius ; Venet ; apud Aldvm. 

In 1476 Aldus cast a Greek alphabet, and 
printed a Greek book. The Pentateuch 
was printed in Hebrew at Soncino, in the 
Duchy of Milan, 1482. Irish characters were 
introduced by Nicholas Walsh, chancellor 
of St. Patrick's, in 1571. 

Aldus's Greek type and books were made 
by the assistance of Greek fugitives from 
Constantinople, which had been captured 
by Mohammed II. in 1453, since which the 
area of Turkish domination had been con- 
tinually extending. Aldus finished the pub- 
lication of his Latin classics in 1494. Some 
of his Greek works were interleaved with 
Latin translations. 

In 1500 he printed the first part of his 
polyglot Bible, the Hebrew, Greek, and Lat- 
in being on the same page. 

The first book printed in the English lan- 
guage was a translation of the Becueil des 
Histoi7'cs de Troyes of Le Fevre, by Margaret, 
sister of Edward IV. of England. When 
the princess married Charles the Bold, Will- 
iam Caxton was one of her household, and 
is understood to have assisted in the trans- 
lation, as also in the setting up and print- 
ing, which were done at Cologne, 1471. Cax- 
ton moved a few years afterward to England, 



where, in 1474, he printed the Game of Chcssc, 
the first book printed in England. 

For some centuries each printer was a 
law unto himself as to forms and face sizes 
of letters, height of type, relation of face 
to body, and composition of type-metal. In 
course of time the most tasteful superseded 
those which had less excellence, and some- 
thing like order was initiated. Without 
citing the successive changes and attempts 
at uniformity, it may be stated that the 
American and English practices approxi- 
mate in the names of the various fonts and 
the sizes of body, from the small diamond, 
which has 205 ems to a foot, to canon, which 
has 18^ ems in that length. The agreement 
is not absolute, nor do even the American 
type-foundries have precisely the same 
standard. The French standard was es- 
tablished in 1730. The height to paper of 
the Bruce type is -ffiy of an inch ; other 
foundries make the height about the same. 

The number of punches in the Imperial 
Printing-office at Paris was 361,000 in 1860. 
It has fonts of fifty-six Eastern languages, 
and sixteen European languages which do 
not use the Roman character. 

The " Specimen Album" of Monsieur C. 
Derriey, of Paris (1862), affords the most 
beautiful aud graceful examples of the art 
of the type cutter, founder, and printer. It 
may fairly be said that the forms, disposi- 
tion of parts, accuracy of apposition and 
register — the latter especially noticeable in 
the chromo printing — have never been ex- 
celled. 

The scheme of a font is the proportion of 
the respective sorts; an approximate esti- 
mate may be given, but different kinds of 
work require different proportions; for in- 
stance, indexes, dictionaries, and directories 
are hard on sorts, as they require so unusual- 
ly large a proportion of capitals and points. 

In a font of 500 pounds : 

Lower-case letters 264 pounds. 

Points and references 20 " 

Figures 14 " 

Capitals 37 " 

Small capitals 17 " 

Braces, dashes, and fractions 13 " 

Spaces and quadrats 98 " 

Italic 37 " 

For French or Italian the above would be 
deficient in accented letters. Fonts for spe- 
cial work also contain numerous sorts not in 



122 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



the above, such, as superior and inferior 
letters in capitals and lower-case, superior 
figures iu Arabic or Roman, prime letters, 
arbitrary signs used in arithmetical, astro- 
nomical, botanical, chemical, classic, com- 
mercial, mathematical, musical, and other 
works. 

Almost every science has symbols of its 
own. Algebra has one set, chemistry anoth- 
er. For a dictionary which attempts to 
represent the minute shades of pronuncia- 
tion a great number are required. Thus in 
Webster or Worcester, what with letters 
with dots above and dots below, lines above, 
below, and across, there are probably 100 
additional characters. Some foreign lan- 
guages have very complicated alphabets. 
The Greek, with its " accents" and " breath- 
ings," requires about 200. Formerly there 
were so many logotypes and abbreviations 
as to require 750 sorts. The Oriental alpha- 
bets are complex. The Hebrew, with the 
Masoretic points, requires about 300 sorts, 
many differing only by a point, stroke, or 
angle. The Arabic has quite as many. In 
Robinson's Hebrew lexicon eight or ten Ori- 
ental languages appear, and required 3000 
sorts, distributed through at least forty 
cases. 

The Chinese dictionary shows 43,496 
words; of these 13,000 are irrelevant, and 
consist of signs which are ill formed and ob- 
solete. For ordinary use 4000 signs suffice. 
Kung-fu-tze can be read with a knowledge 
of 2500. There are 214 root-signs, so to 
speak, which indicate the pronunciation 
and form keys or radicals, called by the Chi- 
nese tribunals. Each character is a word, 
and the actual number is vastly increased 
by tones which give quite a different value 
and meaning. 

The number of letters in the following 
alphabets is thus given in Ballhorn's Gram- 
matography (Trubner and Co., 1861) : 



Hebrew 22 

Cbaldaic 22 

Syriac 22 



Samaritan 22 I Dutch . 

Phoenician 22 

Armenian 38 

Arabic 28 

Persian 32 

Turkish 33 

Georgian 38 

Coptic 32 

Greek 24 

Latin 25 

Sanskrit ... 328 



Ethiopic 202 

Chinese 214 

Japanese 73 



26 

Spanish 27 

Irish 18 

Anglo-Saxon 25 

Danish 28 

Gothic 25 

French 28 

German 26 

Welsh 40 

Russian 35 



TYPE-FOUNDING. 
Type -founding is the invention of Peter 
Schoeffer, and no important improvement 
on his mode seems to have occurred to the 
printers for several centuries. In early 
times all the operations, from the engraving 
of the punches, striking the matrices, and 
casting the type, down to the binding of the 
book, were carried on within the same estab- 
lishment. Caxton seems to have regarded 
himself as well supplied, having five fonts. 
Type-founding was a separate business in 
England in 1637. 

The "Caslon" type-foundry, established 
in London in 1716, is still known by that 
name. 

The first type-founder in America was 
Christopher Saur, of Germantown, Pennsyl- 
vania, and the first font cast was of German 
type, about 1735. In 1768 a foundry was 
established in Boston, but did not succeed. 
Abel Buell, of Killingworth, Connecticut, 
succeeded so far as good work was con- 
cerned, but was prevented by a turbulent 
disposition and by the war of Independ- 
ence, which supervened, and in which he 
took an active part, from pursuing the busi- 
ness to a successful issue. Just before the 
war of the Revolution he was one of the 
party who destroyed the leaden statue of 
George III. in the Bowling Green, New York, 
and was discovered at his house melting up 
the lead into type-metal, so as to put his 
Majesty to work disseminating information. 
A piece of the head of this statue, with 
some punches and matrices, was found many 
years afterward in the ammunition chest 
of an old field-piece to which Buell had been 
attached during the war. 

The American provinces had a hard and 
generally unsuccessful struggle for inde- 
pendence in business before the idea of po- 
litical independence seems to have occurred 
to them. No venture in type-founding was 
successful till about 1798, when Binney and 
Ronaldson established themselves by State 
aid in Philadelphia. The type - founding 
tools and materials imported by Dr. Benja- 
min Franklin from France for his own use 
fell into the hands of Mr. Binney and part- 
ner. 

The old hand-mould and spoon reigned 
supreme till 1838, when the first successful 
type-casting machine was invented by Da- 



TYPE-SETTING MACHINES. 



123 



vid Bruce, Jun., of New York. Machines for 
casting a number of types simultaneously, 
projecting from a common sprue like the 
teeth of a comb, had been invented in Amer- 
ica and in Europe, but no success attended 
them. 

David Bruce's machine is the model- of all 
American and many European type-casting 
machines. The great difficulty experienced 
in the development of the machine was in 
the fact that the resulting type was porous 
and about fifteen per cent, lighter than the 
hand-made, each of which was formed by a 
peculiar spasmodic jerk given by the found- 
er to the mould as he poured in the metal. 
The effect of this was to condense the metal 
and expel air. In the Bruce machine the 









bruoe's type-casting machine. 

metal is kept fluid by a gas jet beneath, 
and is projected into the mould by a pump, 
the spout of which is in front of the metal 
pot. Each revolution of the crank brings 
the mould up to the spout, where it receives 
a charge of metal ; it flies back with it ; tho 
top of the mould opens, and the type falls 
out. The matrix containing the letter is held 
by a spring against the mould opposite to 
the opening at which the metal is injected, 
and the rate of making is about 100 per min- 
ute for average-sized type. 

After casting, the jet or surplus metal at 
the foot of the type, and which formed the 



ingate of the mould, is broken off, the sides 
of the type are rubbed on a grit-stone, they 
are set up regularly in sticks, corrected for 
inequalities, a groove planed in the middle 
of the base, forming what are known as feet. 
The proportion of each letter for a font of 
given weight is arranged in a galley six by 
four and a half inches, and forms what is 
known as a type-founder's page. This is 
papered and marked with the kind of let- 
ter contained. 

Printing types were first electrotyped 
with copper in 1850, and have lately been 
nickel-plated. 

TYPE SETTING AND DISTRIBUTING MACHINES. 

It is now just about fifty years since tho 
first type-setting apparatus was invented, 
and a thoroughly successful machine has 
not yet been introduced. Great hopes have 
been formed from time to time as one ma- 
chine after another has been announced, 
and several of these have done very fair 
work. As mechanical contrivances they 
have been quite ingenious, and have worked 
with a degree of precision which made us 
think again and again that the goal had 
been reached at last. And yet to-day but 
few such machines are in use, and they only 
on a class of plain work where the number 
of sorts is limited. A machine must of 
course include capitals, lower-case, points, 
and figures ; it can not be very efficient with- 
out small capitals and italics, but each ad- 
dition to its capability for variety of work 
adds greatly to its complexity. After all, it 
is a race between fingers traveling from 
the stick to the boxes of the case and back 
again, and fingers beating upon the keys of 
the machine. The latter would of course 
carry the day, as the average travel of the 
hand after a letter is twelve inches from the 
stick, and the travel on the key-board of 
the machine is considerably less than one- 
half this, but there are so many little nice- 
ties to be observed in spacing the words 
and justifying the lines, work which is done 
by the skillful printer as he sets up the line, 
but which, with machine-set type, must be 
done afterward, when the line of type is 
broken into lengths for the measure of the 
work, and then justified by sjmces. Type- 
setting machines have separate pockets or 
galleys for each sort, and the mechanical ar- 



124 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



rangement is such that on touching the key, 
arranged with others like the key-board of 
a piano or concertina, the end type of the 
row is displaced, and is conducted in a chan- 
nel or by a tape to a composing-stick, where 
the types are arranged in regular order in a 
line of indefinite length, and from whence 
they are removed in successive portions to 
a justifying-stick, in which they are spaced 
out to the proper length of line required. 

Three machines of this character were ex- 
hibited at the Paris Exposition in 1855. 

Of the American machines that of Alden 
has perhaps excited most attention. The 
persistence of the inventor for seventeen 
years in the endeavor to perfect his inven- 
tion, and his death, in 1859, when success 
appeared to be crowning his efforts, afford 
one more interesting item to the history of 
invention when it shall come to be written. 
His machine has types arranged around the 
circumference of a horizontal wheel, which 
rotates slowly, carrying with it fingers which 
pick up the proper types from their respect- 
ive cells. The ordinary types are used, with 
the exception that each has its peculiar nick 
on one side, which will enable the fellow- 
machine to discriminate when distributing 
the type. 

In the distributing process the dead mat- 
ter is placed on a bed to the right of the key 
cylinder, and is taken up line by line as each 
is exhausted. The types are taken up by 
distributing transits in the revolving wheel, 
selected by means of the nicks, and then 
transferred by way of the channels to the 
respective type pockets. Extra spaces, etc., 
are tipped out at the end of the channel. 
Unnicked type are thrown into a separate 
box, italics into another. 

Another instance may be given : the Kas- 
tenbeiu composing machine, in which com- 
mon types are used, each sort being arranged 
vertically in a series of tubes, like the pipes 
of an organ. As a letter key of the key- 
board is struck, the lever connecting with 
the particular letter tube opens the lower 
end of the tube, and allows the lowest type 
in the rank to fall into a groove which con- 
ducts it to the slide where the letters are 
assembled in a long line, and whence they 
are taken by the compositor's rule and jus- 
tified. 

The distributing machine reverses this 



method. The dead matter is placed on a bed, 
each line is cut off and the types raised seri- 
atim so that they can be read by the observ- 
er. The corresponding key on the key-board 
being depressed, the type is pushed into its 
appropriate tube, ready for supplying the 
composing machine. 

Priuters have been wont to boast that a 
practical type composing and justifying ma- 
chine presented a problem which even Yan- 
kee ingenuity and persistence could not 
solve ; but in view of the progress made in 
this direction during the last decade, it can 
hardly be doubted that complete success 
will be achieved in the near future. 

Still later machines for composing and 
distributing, the invention of Mr. Paige, 
were recently exhibited in New York, and 
worked well. It remains, however, to be 
determined whether or not the capital in- 
vested in them and the casualties incident 
to complicated and delicate machinery will 
discourage their use in place of composi- 
tors, who own themselves, are always ready, 
and for whom substitutes can be found if 
one or another prove ailing or erratic. 

STEREOTYPING. 

The art of casting solid metallic plates 
from type was invented by William Ged, 
a goldsmith of Edinburgh, in 1731. The 
plates ordered by the University of Oxford 
for an edition of the Bible were mutilated 
by jealous jmnters and thrown aside — the 
old tale of narrow-minded prejudice and ig- 
norance. Ged's plan was the plaster process, 
but after its abandonment several other 
means were tried before the plaster was re- 
sumed. 

Carez (France, 1793) had a plan of dash- 
ing down the inverted form upon a surface 
of hot lead just in the act of solidifying. 
The cast thus obtained was used in the 
same way to obtain a cameo impression for 
a printing surface. Didot's plan consisted 
in casting types of a hard alloy, and press- 
ing them into a surface of pure lead. This 
was brought down upon a paper tray of 
molten type-metal just in the act of solid- 
ifying. The English Monthly Magazine of 
January, 1799, comments on this plan. Her- 
ham set up the form in copper matrices, and 
took a cast therefrom in type-metal. These 
three plans were French. 



STEREOTYPING. 



125 



Stereotyping was introduced into the 
United States by David Bruce, of New York, 
in 1813. The first work cast in America 
was the New Testament, in bourgeois, in 
1814. 

In the plaster process of stereotyping the 
type is set up with spaces, quadrats, and 
leads which come up to the shoulders of the 
type. Guard-lines and bearers are placed 
at the top of the page and at intervals of 
the type liues to support the plate during 
finishing. The type is then oiled, and in- 
closed by a flask to hold within bounds the 
fluid plaster, which is poured upon the face 
of the form, and worked in between the let- 
ters by a roller covered with flannel and 
leather. The plaster soon sets, and the 
mould is carefully raised by screws which 
lift it vertically from the form. The stereo- 
type plate is then cast from the plaster 
mould, which is done by inclosiug the 
mould in a box and plunging it into the 
bath of molten metal. The casting pan is 




CASTING PAN. 



of iron, consisting of a tray and a lid, the 
latter having at its corners gaps for the 
metal to flow in. Each pan has an iron 
plate or floater three - eighths of an inch 
thick, which fits within it. Upon this plate 
the mould is laid face downward. The 
cover is chalked and secured by a yoke and 
screw. The pan is swung over the pot, and 
lowered on to the metal so as to become 
heated, then depressed so that the metal 
flows in at the corners and forces itself be- 
tween the floater and mould. When the pan 
is filled it is submerged, and left till the 
bubbling has ceased. It is now swung over 
the water-trough and cooled. The cast is 
knocked out of the pan, the surrounding 
metal broken off, and the stereotype freed 
from the plaster. 

The plate is then finished by trimming 
the edges, laying it on its fa.ee, and shaving 
off the back to bring it to an even thick- 
ness. The bearers are cut away with a 
chisel and mallet, the heads trimmed, and 
the sides beveled with a plane upon the 




STEREOTYPE CASTING APPARATUS— PLASTER PROCESS. 

shooting-board. The plate is then carefully 
examined and faults repaired. 

In the clay process a plastic composition 
of fine clay and plaster of Paris, with a 
small quantity of gum-arabic water, is 
spread with a trowel to the thickness of a 
quarter of an inch upon a plate which is 
secured to a frame shown in the drawing as 
hinged like a tympan to the press bed. The 
form is laid face upward ou the bed, the 
face of the type is brushed over with ben- 
zine, covered with a cloth and paper, the 
tympan is turned down upon the form, the 
bed run under the platen, and an impression 
taken sufficiently deep to cause the clay to 
flow into the blank spaces and give the gen- 
eral outlines of the type. The press is then 
opened, the cloth and paper removed, and 
also any superfluous material which has been 
thrown up by the first pressure, and would 
be likely to bind. The press is again closed, 
and a complete impression taken, imbedding 
the type in the plastic material to the de- 
sired extent. This process is usually re- 
peated one or more times in order to give 
a sufficient depth to the cups of the letters. 
The metallic plate carrying this mould is re- 
moved from the press, and the mould hard- 
ened by drying. When dry it is set afloat 




MOULDING PRESS — CLAY PROCESS. 



126 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



face upward in a vat of melted type-metal 
iu order to bring it to the same temperature 
as the metal. A wire somewhat thicker than 
a finished stereotype plate, and bent so as to 
surround three sides of the mould, is placed 
on the plate, and a second plate is clamped 
over the wire, as in a moulder's flask. The 
whole is then put in a trough, the open edge 
of the mould upward, and the metal poured 
iu. The casting is cooled by pouring water 
on the plate containing the mould. When 
the flask is opened the metal adheres to the 
mould, which is removed by wetting and 
brushing. The plate is then planed, trimmed, 
and dressed up for use. 

Curved plates for cylinders are made from 
a flat form by using a sheet of spring steel 
of the desired curvature for a mould plate, 
which is spread flat on the tympan, and the 
plastic material is applied upon what is to 
be the concave side. After the impression is 
taken the sheet is released, and resumes its 
normal curvature, bending the plastic mould 
with it. The face of the plate is, of course, 
somewhat distorted, the stereotype appear- 
ing as if taken from type a little more con- 
densed one way than that actually employ- 
ed in the form. 

The papier-macM process is very expedi- 
tious, and is generally used on daily papers 
of large circulation. A paper matrix is 
formed by spreading paste over a sheet of 
moderately thick unsized paper and cover- 
ing it with successive sheets of tissue-pa- 
per, each carefully patted down smooth ; 
the pack is then dampened. The face of 
the type is oiled, the smooth surface of the 
paper treated with powdered French chalk, 
and laid upon the type. A linen rag is 
wetted, wrung out, and laid over the pa- 
per, and dabbed 
on the back with 
a beating brush 
so as to drive the 
soft paper into 
all the inter- 
stices between 
the letters of the 
form. Remove 
the cloth, lay a 
reinforce sheet 
of damp matrix 
papei upon the 

UK ATIMI-T.MM.K — PAPIER-MACHE * 

process, back of the ma- 




trix, and beat again to perfect the impres- 
sion and unite the surfaces of the two. 
For large establishments a matrix rolling 
machine is used, A double thickness of 
blanket is placed upon the matrix, the form 
and matrix laid in a press, and screwed down 
tight. The lighted gas heats the press and 
the form, and dries the paper matrix. The 
press is unscrewed, the matrix removed, and 
it is warmed on the moulding press. The 




STEREOTYPE MOULD-BUYING PRESS — rAPER PROCESS. 

matrix is then placed iu the previously heat- 
ed iron casting mould, and a casting gauge 
to determine the thickness of the stereo- 
type plate is placed upon it. This extends 
around three sides of the matrix, the other 
being left open to serve as a gate at which 
the molten metal is poured in. The cover 
is screwed tight, the mould tipped to bring 
the mouth up, and the metal poured. "When 
the metal is set the mould is opened and 
the matrix removed. The plate is then 
trimmed and otherwise prepared in the 
usual manner. 

ELECTROTYPIXG. 

Electrotyping is an application of the art 
of electroplating, which originated with 
Volta, Cruikshank, and Wollaston about 
1800-01. In 1838 Spencer, of London, made 
casts of coins and impressions in intaglio 
from the matrices thus formed. In the same 
year Jacobi, of Dorpat, in Russia, made casts 
by electro-deposition, which caused him to 
be put in charge of the work of gilding the 
dome of St. Isaac's at St. Petersburg. Elec- 
trotyping originated with Mr. Joseph A. 
Adams, a wood-engraver of New York, who 
made casts in 1839-41 from wood-cuts, some 
engravings being printed from electrotype 
plates in the latter year. Many improve- 



ELECTROTYPING. 



L27 



ments in detail have been added since to 
the process as well as the appliances. Mur- 
ray introduced graphite as a coatiug for the 
forms and moulds. 

The process of electrotyping is as follows : 
The form is locked up very tight, and is 
then coated with a surface of graphite, com- 
monly known as black-lead; but this is a mis- 
uomer. This is usually put on with a brush, 
and may be done very evenly and speedily by 
a machine in which the brush is reciprocated 




BLAOK-LEADING MAOHINK. 

over the type by a band wheel, crank, and 
pitman. A soft brush aud very finely pow- 
dered graphite are used, the superfluous 
powder beiug removed, aud the face of the 
type then cleaned by the palm of the hand. 
Knight's wet process of black-leading, as 
practiced at Harper and Brothers' establish- 
ment, is, however, much to be preferred, and 
will be described presently. 

A shallow pan, known as a moulding pan, 
is then filled with melted yellow wax, mak- 
ing a smooth, even surface, which is black- 
leaded. The pan is then secured to the 
bed of the press, and the form placed on the 
bed, which is raised to deliver an impres- 
sion of the type upon the wax. 




The pan is removed from the head of the 
press, placed on a table, and built up, as it is 
termed. This consists in running wax upon 
the portions where large spaces occur be- 
tween type, in order that the corresponding 
portions in the electrotype may not be 
touched by the iuking-roller, or by the pa- 
per sagging down in printing. 

The wax mould being built, is ready for 
black-leading, to give it a conducting sur- 
face upon which the metal may be deposit- 
ed in the bath. The wax mould is laid face 
upward on the floor of an inclosed box, and 
a torrent of finely pulverized graphite sus- 
pended in water is poured upon it by means 
of a rotary pump, a hose, aud a distributing 
nozzle, which dashes the liquid equally over 
the whole surface of the mould. Superflu- 
ous graphite is then removed by copious 
washing, an extremely fine film of graph- 
ite adhering to the wax. This is Silas P. 
Knight's process, and answers a triple pur- 
pose. It coats the mould with graphite, 
wets it ready for the bath, and expels air 
bubbles from the letters. This process pre- 
vents entirely the circulation of black-lead 
in the air, which has heretofore been so ob- 
jectionable in the process of electrotyping. 
Black-lead being nearly pure carbon, is a 
poor conductor, and in the usual process a 
part of the metal of the pan is scraped clean 
to form a place for the commencement of the 
deposit, and the back of the moulding pan is 
waxed to prevent deposit of copper thereon. 
When the dry black-leading is used the face 
of the matrix is wetted to drive away all 
films or bubbles of air which may otherwise 
be attached to the black-leaded surface of 
the type. 

The mould is then placed in the bath con- 



ELEOTROTYPING TRUSS. 




ELEOTROTYTING BATH AND BATTERY. 

taining a solution of sulphate of copper, and 
is made part of an electric circuit, in which 
is also included the zinc element in the sul- 
phuric acid solution in the other bath. A 
film of copper is deposited on the black-lead 



128 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



surface of the mould, and when this shell 
is sufficiently thick, it is taken from the 
bath, the wax removed, the shell trimmed, 
the back tinned, straightened, backed with 
au alloy of type-metal, then shaved to a 
proper thickness, and mounted on a block 
to make it type-high. 

Knight's expeditious process consists 
in dusting tine iron filings upon the wet 
graphite surface of the wax mould, and 
then pouring upon it a solution of sul- 
phate of copper. Stirring with a brush 
expedites the contact, and a decomposition 
takes place ; the acid leaves the copper, 
and forms with the iron a sulphate solu- 
tion, which floats off, while the copper is 
freed and deposited in a pure metallic form 
upon the graphite. The black surface takes 
on a ruddy tinge with marvelous rapidity. 
The film is afterward increased in the usual 
manner in the electro bath, but the deposit 
takes place immediately and regularly over 
the whole surface. The saving in time, acid, 
copper, and zinc is very great. 

THE PRINTING-PRESS. 

The printing-press in its earlier forms was 
but an adaptation of the ordinary screw- 
press. The form was locked up in a tray 
and placed on a platform, upon which the 
platen Avas brought down by a screw trav- 
eling in a cross-bar above. The screw was 
moved by a lever, which was shifted into 
holes in the boss of the screw. 



j Dgfr' 





BENJAMIN FRANKUN S PRESS. 



LORD STANHOPE'S rRE88. 

The Blaew was the first patent press, 
1620. The carriage was rounced in beneath 
the platen ; the pressure was given by a 
handle attached to a screw hanging from 
the beam, and having a spring which caused 
the screw to fly back as soon as the impres- 
sion was given. Blaew was a very ingen- 
ious and versatile man, and was for some 
time, in the earlier portion of his career, as- 
sociated with Tycho Brahe, at the observa- 
tory of the latter in Denmark, in contriv- 




" COLUMBIAN" PRESS. 

ing instruments and reducing observations. 
Subsequently he was in Amsterdam, where 
he made globes and maps, and invented his 
improvements in printing-presses. He died 
there in 1638. 

The Franklin press, one hundred years 
afterward in London, was a Blaew press 
with some minor improvements. 

To this succeeded the Stanhope press, 
about the end of the eighteenth century. 
The oscillating handle operates a toggle to 
force down the platen upon the paper on 
the form. The bed travels on ways, and 



PRINTING-PRESSES. 



129 



the tyinpan and frisket are hinged to lay 
back in elevated position. 

The " Columbian" press, by George Cly- 
mer, of Philadelphia, was invented about 
1817, and was perhaps the first important 
American contribution to the art of press- 
making. The power is applied to the plat- 
en by a compound lever consisting of three 
simple levers of the second order. Peter 
Smith's hand-press soon succeeded the " Co- 
lumbian," and in 1829 the "Washington" 




" WASHINGTON" PRESS. 

was patented by Samuel Rust. The press- 
ure in this is obtained by a compound lever 
applied to a toggle-joint, and the platen is 
lifted by springs on each side. The frame 
is made in sections, and the bed is run in 
and out by turning a crank which has a belt 
attached to its pulley or rounce. The tyni- 
pan and frisket are held up by the nature 
of their hinges, which allow only a certain 
amount of swing. 

Power-presses or printing -machines, as they 
are indifferently called, belong exclusively 
to our century. Nicholson obtained a par- 
ent for a cylinder printing-machine (1) in 
1790. It is not known that it was ever 
brought into use, but several of its features 
have survived in later and successful ma- 
chines. The ink was applied by a roller ; 
the types were made narrower toward the 
foot, so as to fit against each other snugly 
when attached to the exterior surface of a 
cylinder. The type cylinder revolved in 
gear with a leather-covered impression cyl- 
inder, and at another part of its rotation 
with an inking cylinder, to which inking 
9 




PRINCIPLES OF ACTION OF POWER-rRESBES. 

apparatus was applied. The arrangement 
was modified (2) for a flat bed. 

Konig, a German, constructed a printing- 
machine (3) for Mr. Walter, of the London 
Times, in 1814. The issue of the 28th of No- 
vember of that year was the first newspaper 
printed by machinery driven by steam-pow- 
er. It gave 1100 impressions per hour, and 
subsequently was worked up to 1800. The 
paper was held to its cylinder by tapes ; the 
form was reciprocated beneath the inking 
apparatus and the paper cylinder alternate- 



130 



MECHANICAL PKOGRESS. 



ly. To double the rate, a paper cylinder 
was to be placed on eacb side of the inking 
apparatus. The ink was placed in a trough, 
and ejected upon the upper of a series of 
rollers, passing downward in the series ; and 
here first occurred the distributing roller 
with end motion. 

Konig's press (4), which consisted of two 
single machines acting in concert and con- 
secutively upon the two sides of the sheet, 
was perhaps the first attempt at a perfect- 
ing press. It was erected in 1818, but did 
not prove successful. 

Donkin and Bacon's machine (5), 1813, 
was built for the University of Cambridge, 
England. Several forms were attached on 
the sides of a prism, and were presented con- 
secutively to the inking cylinder and paper 
cylinder. In this machine were first used 
the composition inking-rollers, of glue and 
molasses. 

In 1815 Cowper obtained a patent for 
curved stereotype plates, to be affixed to a 
cylinder (6). By duplication of parts the 
machine (7) was designed to become a per- 
fecting press. The greater portion of the 
cylinder forms a distributing surface for the 
ink, the remainder is occupied by the stere- 
otype plate. 

Applegath and Cowper's single machine 
(8) went back again to the flat reciprocating 
bed, the double machine (9) being a perfect- 
ing press. This machine was the first to 
have diagonal distributing rollers to spread 
the ink smoothly by sliding on the recipro- 
cating inking-table. 

Applegath and Cowper's four-cylinder 
machine (10), 1827, superseded Konig's in 
the Times office, and printed at the rate of 
5000 per hour on one side. It had four 
printing cylinders, one form of type on a 
flat bed, and the paper cylinders were alter- 
nately raised and depressed, so that two 
were printed during the passage one way, 
and the other two on the return passage. 
A pair of inking-rollers between the paper 
cylinders obtained their ink from the table. 

Applegath's machine, 1848, was long used 
upon the Times. It introduced one novelty 
— placing the whole series of cylinders on 
end. On the vertical type cylinder the typo 
were arranged in upright columns, forming 
flat polygonal sides tu the drum. Arranged 
around it were eight sets of inking appara- 



tus alternating with eight impression cyl- 
inders, and the paper, fed from eight banks, 
was delivered upon as many tables. The 
paper fed from each feed-board was carried 
by tapes and rollers, and passed on edge to 
the type and impression cylinders, was car- 
ried off, thrown over flatwise, caught by a 
boy, and placed upon the table. The num- 
ber of sheets per hour worked upon this ma- 
chine rose from 8000 in 1848 to as high as 
12,000, printed on one side. 

The Hoe type-revolving printing-machine 
(11) is made with two to ten printing cyl- 
inders arranged in planetary form around 
the periphery of the larger type-carrying 
cylinder. The type is secured in turtles, or 
the stereotype is bent to the curve of the 
cylinder. The circumference of the central 
cylinder has a series of binary systems, the 
elements of which are an inking apparatus 
and an impression apparatus, the paper be- 
ing fed to the latter and carried away there- 
from by tapes to a flyer, which delivers it on 
to a table. It has as many banks as feeder 
or impression cylinders. 

There are numerous modifications of the 
flat-bed and type-revolving machines for 
more or less rapid work, perfecting or for 
one side only ; for fine wood-cut work, book- 
work, or job-work ; with continuously re- 
volving cylinders or stop-cylinders, which 
pause while the bed returns ; with inking- 
rollers varying in number with the kind of 
work required; and with many variations 
in size for posters, handbills, and cards. 

The first flat -surface printing-machine 
was made by Daniel Treadwell, of Boston, 
in 1822. His machines, first used in Boston, 
were afterward used by Daniel Fanshaw iu 
New York in printing the Bibles and tracts 
for the "American Bihle Society" and the 
"American Tract Society." The machines 
for the former society were driven by a 
steam-engine, and those for the latter by 
two mules in the upper story of the Tract- 
house building, using an endless-track pow- 
er. In this press the platen conies down on 
the type. These were the first printing- 
machines in America driven by other than 
hand-power, and were long used by Gales 
and Seatou iu Washington in printing the 
Congressional reports, etc. 

Next was the Adams press, which wa<i 
introduced in 1830, has been since much im- 



CYLINDER PRESSES. 



131 




AT>AMB PEESS. 



proved, and still has a high reputation. Its 
movement is based on that of the hand- 
press, and gives a perfectly flat impression 
by lifting the bed of the press and its form 
against a stationary platen. Sheets are fed 
to the press by hand, and taken away by 
tapes and a fly. One thousand sheets an 
hour is a full speed for a large Adams press 
on book forms. It is shown in the figure by 
a longitudinal vertical section : a is the bed, 
which is raised by straightening the tog- 
gles, b 1) ; e is the platen, d the ink fountain 
and ink-distributing apparatus. The ink- 
ing-rollers, e e, pass twice over the form, and 
are attached to the frame of the tympan, 
/. The segment g serves to straighten the 



toggles, and cause the impression ; h is the 
feed-board, i the drive-pulley, and k a gear 
wheel, with a pitman rod to g ; I is the fly. 

Single-cylinder presses, such as Hoe's, Pot- 
ter's, Campbell's, etc., have a flat bed, which 
is geared to reciprocate at an even speed 
with a revolving cylinder. Sheets of paper 
are fed to the cylinder, which carries a pre- 
pared tympan. The inked form runs along 
with the sheet until it is printed, when the 
form is retracted and inked again. In some 
machines the cylinder stops after the im- 
pression is delivered. 

The Campbell press is remarkable for sev- 
eral fine points of adjustment. The opera- 
tion is controlled by the sheet, which, when 




CAMPBELL'S SINGLE-OYLrNDEH TKESS. 



132 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 




GORDON JOB PKESS. 

badly fed, is thrown out. The registering 
is operated by a small valve through the 
agency of points, making an electric circuit 
through point-holes in the sheet. When the 
press fails to point, the exhaust apparatus is 
brought into action, operating a bolt at- 
tached to a diaphragm, which locks up the 
impression. It has other peculiar features 
well worth mentioning if space permitted. 

America produces a remarkable variety 
of handy job presses, known by the name 
of the makers, as the " Gordon," or by 
names which constitute trade-marks, as the 
"Globe," "Liberty," "Universal," etc.— a fa- 
vorite device both with books in the early 
days of the art and with presses for a hun- 
dred years past ; witness the " Columbian" 



and "Washington" hand-presses. One in- 
stance may be given. 

The form in the " Gordon" press is secured 
in a chase, which is clamped to the bed, b, of 
the press. This bed rocks on a pivot at c, 
and comes into parallelism with the platen, 
p, when the impression is about to be given. 
The platen rocks on the main shaft, d, which 
is propelled by pitman and intermediate 
gearing from the treadle, i. The arm, m s, 
is the roller - carrier, which swings on a 
pivot, r, and carries the rollers, n n, alter- 
nately over the form and the revolving 
disk, t, which distributes the ink : g is a 
counter - weight to balance the swinging 
bed and attachments, and operate the mova- 
ble fingers by a spring bar, a : v is the feed- 
board. 

The iceb press is a later thought, and bids 
fair to supersede all others for large editions 
and long numbers, where great nicety is not 
required. It is not yet expected that for 
fine work and cuts it will supersede the flat- 
surface and reciprocating-bed presses. 

The "Walter" press prints the London 
Times and the New York Times. A roll of 
paper, a, three miles long, reels off over the 
pulley, b, which serves to keep it taut. It 
then passes by the wetting rollers, c c, and 
over the cylinder d to the first type cylin- 
der, e, between which and the blanket cyl- 
inder, /, it receives its first impression. 
Following the direction of the type cylin- 
der, it passes between two blotting cylin- 
ders, and is then delivered to the second 
printing cylinder, g, receiving the impres- 
sion at h. It is then cut by a knife on the 




WALTER 8 PERFECTING TRESS. 



WALTER AND BULLOCK PRESSES. 



133 




' buxlook" perfecting press. 



cylinder i. The sheets are finally piled by 
two persons on the paper-boards, k Jc. The 
speed of the Walter press is 11,000 printed 
sheets per hour. 

The " Bnllock" press, so named from the 
inventor, the late William Bullock, of Phil- 
adelphia, carries the forms upon two cylin- 
ders, requires no attendants to feed it, and 
delivers the sheets printed on both sides. 
The paper, in the form of an endless roll, is 
moistened by passing through a shower of 
spray. A single roll will contain enough 
for several thousand sheets, and the print- 



ing operation, including the cutting of the 
paper into proper lengths, proceeds uninter- 
ruptedly until the roll is exhausted. The 
roll of paper having been mounted in its 
place, the machinery is started, unwinds the 
paper, cuts off the required size, prints it on 
both sides at one operation, counts the num- 
ber of sheets, and deposits them on the de- 
livery board at the rate of 6000 to 8000 per 
hour. The roll of paper, a, is cut into sheets 
by a knife on roller & acting against the cyl- 
inder c. The sheets are seized by grippers, 
carried between the impression cylinder, g, 




" victory" perfecting press and folding machine. 



134 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 




"uoe" web perfecting tress. 



and the form, e, receiving the first impres- 
sion. The printed sheet then follows the 
large cylinder, g, to the second form, receiv- 
ing its second impression from this form 
acting against the large drum, g. From the 
large cylinder the sheets are automatical- 
ly delivered to the receiving hoard: i is a 
counting device or arithmometer. The iuk- 
ing-rollers are shown above the inking cyl- 
inders, beneath which are the ink-troughs. 
The starting lever is shown on the right. 

The "Victory," like those just described, 
receives its paper from a roll. The names 
on the parts will obviate the necessity of 
specific description. The paper is led over 
two wetting boxes, and then over two hot 
copper cylinders, and entered between the 
first type and impression cylinders. Here 
one side is printed, and it thence goes to the 
second type and impression cylinder, where 
it is backed. It then travels to the cutting 
and folding cylinders, where it receives a 
transverse fold, and meantime the doubled 
paper is passed to a serrated knife, which 
cuts the first printed sheet from the web. 
A second blunt knife again folds the double 
sheet, which is carried by grippers to a vi- 
bratory frame, entering each alternate sheet 
to the respective pairs of cross-folding roll- 
ers, which deliver the sheets to tapes, which 
carry them to a swinging delivery frame, by 
which they are deposited in a pile on the 
table. 

This machine will damp, print, cut, fold, 
and deliver about 15,000 per hour of an 
eight-page newspaper of fifty inches square ; 
or it will damp, print, cut, fold, and paste a 
cover of four pages on a twenty-four page 
paper at the speed of 7000 per hour. 



The " Hoe" web perfecting press is one of 
the lately established and successful candi- 
dates for public favor. The paper is print- 
ed from a roll containing a length of over 
four miles and a half, equal to 10,000 papers. 
The machine has three pairs of cylinders 
geared together. A roll, having been pre- 
viously damped, is lifted into place by a 
small crane, and the paper from it passes 
between the first pair of cylinders, the cir- 
cumferences of each of which are just equal 
to the required length of the sheet. One of 
these cylinders has its periphery covered 
with stereotype plates of the matter to be 
printed, and is supplied in the usual manner 
with an ink fountain and distributing roll- 
ers, which, as the cylinder revolves, apply 
the ink to the stereotype forms. The other 
cylinder is covered with a blanket, and as 
they revolve together, with the paper be- 
tween them, they print its first side. The 
paper then passes on between the second 
pair of cylinders, and presents its blank side 
to the stereotype plates of the second type 
cylinder. It next passes to the cutting cyl- 
inders, the periphery of one of which has a 
vibrating and projecting knife that at each 
revolution enters a groove in the opposite 
cylinder and severs a sheet from the roll. 
The sheets are successively conveyed by two 
series of endless tapes to a revolving cylin- 
der, which retains them until six (or any 
desired number) are collected upon it, when 
they are delivered in a body to the sheet 
flyer. A circular cutter cuts the double 
sheets into single copies. 

A counter is attached which shows the 
number of sheets printed. The machine oc- 
cupies a space of about twenty feet long, six 



FOLDING MACHINES. 



13£ 



feet wide, and seven feet 
high, and delivers 12,000 to 
15,000 perfected sheets per 
hour. 

These machines have a 
reputation on both sides of 
the Atlantic, being used by 
the London Lloyds' News, 
Standard, and Telegraph, 
while five of them are now 
building for offices in the 
United States and two for 
Australia. 

FOLDING MACHINES. 

As an improvement oc- 
curs in one of the machines 
of a series, every other one 
has to mend its pace to 
keep up. So we found it 
with the ginning, carding, spinning, and 
weaving of fibre ; so it was with the smelt- 
ing, puddling, rolling, forging, turning, and 
planing of iron : one improvement begets 
another, and a halting member of a series 
which retards the speed becomes the object 
of so much solicitude that it shall go hard 
but he ere long outstrip his brethren in the 
race. 

Machines for folding newspapers and 
sheets for books follow naturally in the 
wake of the presses. They are made of 
various kinds for octavo, 16mo, and 32mo ; 
also for folding 12mo, cutting off, pasting, 
and inserting the inset ; in some cases pla- 
cing it in a cover, and doubling it up into 
compact shape for the mail wrapper. 

The book-folding machine illustrated is 
for octavo work, sixteen pages on a sheet, 
eight pages on a side. 

The sheet is placed on the table so that 
two register points pass through two holes 
in the sheet previously made on the print- 
ing-press. The folder comes down upon the 
folding edge, the pins give way, and the 
sheet passes, doubled edge first, between a 
pair of rollers, which compress it ; tapes de- 
liver it to a second table beneath, where a 
second and a third folder act upon it in turn, 
and it is delivered into a trough at the rate 
of 1500 per hour. 

With 12mo work imposed in two parts of 
sixteen and eight pages respectively, the ma- 
chine cuts them apart, and folds the larger 




OUAMBKRS'8 FOLDING MACHINE. 

part like an octavo ; the smaller folds but 
once, and is then " inset" into the octavo 
portion, which forms the "outset." 

The two-sheet folder and paster, for large 
twenty-four-page periodicals, folds one sheet 
of sixteen pages, 30^ by 45£ inches, insetting 
the eight pages within the sixteen, and past- 
ing and trimming all, delivering a complete 
copy of twenty-four pages ready to read at 
the rate of 1200 per hour. It will fold eight 
pages alone, sixteen pages alone, with or 
without pasting or trimming, or will fold, 
paste, and trim the eight pages, insetting 
without pasting them in. 

Machines of this general character are 
also made for folding, pasting, and trim- 
ming, or for folding, pasting, trimming all 
around, and putting on a cover of different- 
colored paper. The Christian Union is fold- 
ed, inset, and covered in this manner, four 
of these machines being attached to a four- 
cylinder " Hoe" press. 

ADDRESSING MACHINES. 

Addressing machines are of two general 
kinds ; one cuts the addresses from printed 
and gummed strips and attaches them to 
the paper. The Dick machine works in this 
way. 

The other mode is to set up the addresses 
in a galley, and bring them successively to 
a spot at which the enveloped papers are 
consecutively presented. 

The machine illustrated is one of many of 



136 



MECHANICAL PKOGRESS. 




ADDRESSING MACHINE. 

the latter class. It prints with ink on the 
papers or wrappers at the rate of 3000 per 
hour. The names are set up in long narrow 
galleys holding fifty or seventy-five each, 
and after inking with a hand-roller, these 
are placed successively in the channel of the 
table, and are pushed along by the apparatus 
till each name in turn has come under the 
impression lever, which is worked by the 
treadle. The motion of the galley is auto- 
matic, and the machine indicates a change 
of post-office by the stroke of a bell, so that 
the papers may be thrown into separate 
piles to be bundled for mailing. 

The "Forsaith" addressing machine also 
operates in a very satisfactory manner. 

PRINTING FOR THE BLIND. 

The art of printing in raised letters which 
may be distinguished by the touch origi- 
nated and has been developed Avithin the 
century. The first successful efforts in this 
direction were made at Paris in 1784 by the 
Abbe" Valentin Haiiy, who in the same year 
founded " L'Institution Royale des Jeunes 
Aveugles," the first institution ever estab- 
lished for the instruction of the blind. 

Various systems of forming the embossed 
characters have since been introduced, which 
may be divided into two classes — the arbi- 
trary, arranged exclusively with reference to 
the supposed greater facility with which 
their forms may be distinguished by the 
touch, no attempt being made to imitate or- 
dinary printing; and the alphabetical, in 
which the letters resemble those ordinarily 
employed. 

Prominent among the first are those of 
Lucas, Frcre, Moon, Braille, and Carton. 
Lucas's system is composed of a series of 



dots, curves, and straight lines, each of 
which represents a letter, distinguishable 
by its form or the position in which it is set. 
Many contractions and abbreviations are 
employed, and though it is claimed to be 
easily read by the touch, its bulk and the 
frequent ambiguities arising from the pecul- 
iar system of abbreviations are objection- 
able. Thirty-six volumes are required to 
contain the Scriptures, which in the Amer- 
ican lower-case alphabet are comprised in 
eight. 

Frere's system is phonetic, thirty-six char- 
acters being employed, each representing a 
simple sound. 

Moon, himself a blind man, represents the 
letters of the ordinary alphabet by charac- 
ters, each composed of but one or two lines. 
The printing is read alternately from left to 
right and from right to left. 

Braille's system is that generally employed 
in France : the letters are formed by combi- 
nations of dots varying in number frorn one 
to six. 

Carton's system also employs dots, but 
arranged to more nearly resemble the letters 
of the Roman alphabet. 

Among those known as alphabetical are — 

The French, a combination of lower-case 
and capitals. 

Alston's, English, has modified Roman cap- 
itals. 

Friedlander's, American, Roman capitals 
of the kind known as block letters. 

That of Dr. S. G. Howe, principal of the 
Institution for the Blind at Boston, Massa- 
chusetts, employs an angular form of lower- 
case for all the letters except G and J, which 
are capitals. This character is used at most 
of the institutions in the United States, and 
many valuable works have been printed in it. 

Mr. N. B. Kneass, of Philadelphia, himself 
a blind man and a publisher of works for 
the blind, employs lower-case like that of 
Dr. Howe and block capitals, under the title 
of " Kneass's improved combined letter." 

ENGRAVING. 

The early history of engraving concerns 
the inscriptions on stones ; the " iron pen," 
and inlaid " leaden letters" in the rock, re- 
ferred to by Job, if that be a fair under- 
standing of the passage. Contemporary 
with this are the carved and lettered obe- 



ENGRAVING. 



137 



lisks of Egypt, the tablets of Assyria and 
Etruria, the engraved gems in the breast- 
plate of Aaron, perhaps the leaden plates 
inscribed with Hesiod's " works and days," 
which were so long preserved at the fount- 
ain of Helicon, in Bceotia, as recorded by 
Pausanias. 

From inscriptions the Greeks proceeded 
to engraving maps on metallic plates; and 
the brass plates containing the Roman laws 
were complete enough for printing, but it 
does not seem to have been thought of. The 
history of engraving is the history of print- 
ing ; but we must not repeat it here. 

The art of engraving is naturally divis- 
ible into three orders — metal, wood, stone ; 
the latter better known as lithography, and 
considered separately. 

Engraving on metallic plates originated 
with chasers and inlayers. It can not but 
be that such artists took proof in dirty oil 
on rag or leather, but no impression of in- 
trinsic value was had until the time of Fini- 
guerra, a Florentine artist, in 1440. Euclid 
was printed with diagrams on copper in 1482. 
The copper-plate press was invented in 1545. 
Etching on copper by means of aquafortis 
was invented by F. Mazzuoli, or Pahnegiani, 
in 1532 ; mezzotint engraving by Von Siegen 
in 1643 ; improved by Prince Rupert, 1648, 
and by Sir Christopher Wren in 1662. 

Stipple engraving — also called "chalk en- 
graving," from the resemblance of the work 
to crayon drawing — was invented by Jacob 
Baylaert in London in 1769; engraving on 
steel as a substitute for copper, by Jacob 
Perkins, of Philadelphia, in 1819. 

The present century has not devised much 
that is new except the ruling machine by 
Wilson Lowry. 

Plate engraving flourished in England 
from 1800 to 1850, but photography and li- 
thography have gradually pushed it aside, 
since which the skill has decayed and the 
demand fallen off. Until this decadence 
persons of average taste would claim that 
though our predecessors excelled in rude 
vigor, our execution was as good as that 
of the earlier masters, and our effects bet- 
ter, the connoisseurs in the antique to the 
contrary notwithstanding. Nor will it avail 
for such to quote Gilford's sarcasm, 

" We want their strength : agreed ; but we atone 
For that and more by sweetness all our own." 



Wood-engraving originated in China, as 
we have had occasion to observe before ; its 
first uses in Europe were in ornamenting 
paper and fabrics, afterward for making 
playing-cards. 

The earliest known wood-cut with a date 
—the St. Christopher of 1423— is in the Al- 
thorpe Library, England, which, it may be 
stated in passing, contains the most valu- 
able single volume in the world, an edition 
of Boccaccio printed at Venice by Valdarfer 
in 1474, of which no other perfect copy 
is known. It sold at the Duke of Rox- 
burgh's sale in 1812 for £1260. The art 
of wood-engraving was much improved by 
Durer, 1471-1528 ; by Bewick, 1789. It has 
gone on improving ever since, by fits and 
starts, but always onward. The great use 
made of it by the Illustrated London News is 
an era ; its advance over the Penny Encyclo- 
pedia affords a good means of judging the 
rate of progress. Our best illustrated peri- 
odicals and books are triumphs of the art. 

LITHOGRAPHY. 

The art of engraving or drawing on stone, 
so that printed copies may be obtained there- 
from in the press, originated with Alois Sene- 
felder, of Munich, 1796-1800. The invention 
was not a mere accident, as recounted in the 
common myth of an absent-minded man, 
a piece of limestone, and a waiting washer- 
woman, but was the result of earnest, per- 
sistent, and intelligent work directed to an 
object kept steadily in view. 

The stone used for lithographic work is a 
compact sedimentary limestone of a yellow- 
ish or bluish-gray color, which comes from 




LITHOORAPHIO HAND-PRESS. 



138 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



the Solenhofen quarries in Bavaria. It is 
ground by moviug one stone upon another 
with sand between them, and then polished 
with pumice-stone. 

Upon the stone thus prepared the design 
may be produced in four ways : 

1. It may be done with a fluid, watery 
ink. 

2. With a solid crayon. 

3. By a transfer from an inky design on 
paper. 

4. By engraving with an etching point. 

1. The ink is essentially a soluble soap col- 
ored with lamp-black, applied with a pen or 
hair-pencil. The stone is then etched with 
a weak acidulous solution, decomposing the 
soap, combining with its alkali, and setting 
free the fatty acid in contact with the par- 
ticles of carbonate of lime of which the 
stone consists, forming an insoluble lime 
soap which no washing or rubbing can re- 
move and no fatty matter can penetrate. 
The stone is then flooded with gum-arabic 
water to incapacitate the clear parts from 
receiving ink when wetted. The stone is 
now placed in the press and made ready. 
With a sponge and abundance of water ex- 
cess of gum is washed off, and, while still 
wet, the drawing is washed out with turpen- 
tine applied with a rag. This appears to ob- 
literate every thing, but a close inspection 
shows the work as a pale white design on the 
face of the stone. The stone is now rolled 
up by passing a roller charged with printing- 
ink over its face, which is still damp ; the 
greasy ink adheres to the white design, while 
the clear gummed damp face takes no ink. 
A sheet of paper is laid upon it, the tympan 
closed, and the stone pulled through. The 
operations of damping, inking, and printing 
are then repeated in succession. 

2. The work by lithographic crayon is upon 
a grained stone, the surface of which is even- 
ly roughened by grinding with very sharp 
and even sand of a grade according to the 
fineness of grain required. The crayon is of 
soap, wax, and tallow, and it is used on the 
stone as a drawing chalk is upon rough 
Whatman paper. The subsequent processes 
in preparing the stone are the same as those 
before described. The process gives oppor- 
tunity for much artistic taste and display, 
the broken surface of the stone preventing 
the continuity of the lines, whose depth of 



color will depend upon the pressure of the 
crayon upon the rasping surface. 

3. The transfer method consists in placing 
the design on paper and then transferring it 
to the stone. The writing, for instance, is 
done on ordinary sized paper, but preferably 
on paper prepared with a coating of gela- 
tine, which may be colored with gamboge. 
The written sheet is damped, laid face down 
on the stone, and pulled through. The ink 
adheres to the stone, which is treated as be- 
fore. 

4. The engraving method differs from the 
preceding. The surface of the stone is treat- 
ed with gum-arabic water, which, when dry, 
is colored to allow the succeeding work to 
show. The design is then scratched in with 
needles or diamond points, and the face of 
the stone flooded with oil, which is absorbed 
by the stone where the etching points have 
laid it bare. The coloring matter and ex- 
cess of gum are washed off, and the lines 
are rilled with ink, the gum protecting the 
clean surface. The paper is laid on, and the 
stone pulled through the press, the sheet 
lifting the ink out of the lines. It is not 
usual to print from the engraved stone, but 
to transfer an impression therefrom to an- 
other one and print in the usual way. 

There are many modifications of the art : 
a tint is rubbed on dry, and distributed or 
rubbed off according to the lights and shades 
of the design ; by another mode the surface 
is covered with a solution of asphalt and 
crayon, and scraped off for the lights. The 
list might be much extended. 

Until a comparatively recent period all 
lithographic printing has been upon hand- 
presses, but lately a successful lithographic 
printing-machine has been made. Hoe's 
machine is a stop-cylinder press, that is, one 
in which the cylinder comes to a stop pend- 
ing the adjustment of the sheet. The pa- 
per is fed to grippers on the cylinder from 
the inclined table above. The traveling 
bed on which the stone rests is drawn un- 
der the cylinder by a crank and connecting 
rod from the end of the frame below, and 
the cylinder, after being thrown into gear, 
is rotated at the same time (carrying the 
sheet with it) by a rack attached to the 
side of the bed. At the end of the stroke 
the cylinder goes out of gear, and remains 
stationary and locked during the return of 



LITHOGRAPHY. 



139 




HOE'S LITHOGKAPUIO PRINTING-MACHINE. 



the bed and stone, the latter passing under 
a cut-away part of the cylinder, so as not to 
come in contact with it. In place of a tym- 
pan the cylinder is covered with a thin 
rubber blanket. The inking of the stone is 
effected by parallel rollers (from three to 
six) in front of the cylinder, upon which 
are heavy riding rollers of iron, the latter 
being made to vibrate laterally to aid the 
distribution of the ink. These inking-roll- 
ers are covered with leather, like the ordi- 
nary hand-rollers for lithographic printing ; 
they receive their ink from a table which 
travels with the bed, and are driven by a 
rack or friction pieces on the sides of the 
bed. The ink is fed to the table from a 
fountain at the end of the press, and dis- 
tributed by a number of oblique-lying roll- 
ers, also covered with leather. The auto- 
matic damping arrangement is at the back 
of the cylinder. It consists of a shallow 
trough containing water, partially immersed 
in which a cylinder of wood is made slowly 
to revolve. An absorbent roller is held in 
contact with the surface of this roller for 
a longer or shorter time, according to the 
amount of water required upon the stone, 
after which it carries its increase of moist- 
ure over to a heavy riding roller, which 
again gives it up to two damping rollers 
covered with linen, which traverse the stone 
as it passes beneath them, just before it 
meets the inking-r oilers near the cylinder; 
the feed of water admits of adjustment as 
to quantity while the press is in motion. 



The pressure in this press is adjusted by 
means of butting screws, which lift or lower 
the bed in the traveling carriage ; these 
screws are turned by a key from above. 
When the sheet is printed it is conveyed by 
an intermediate cylinder provided with grip- 
pers to the fly at the end of the press, and 
there deposited, face up, on the pile of print- 
ed work. 

This press, though by no means identical 
with European machines of the same class, 
may be regarded as furnishing an illustra- 
tion of the essential features of them all. 

The introduction of the lithographic pow- 
er-press has totally remodeled the litho- 
graphic trade throughout the world within 
the short period of six years (1868-74), in- 
creasing the possible production about ten- 
fold. It has lowered the cost of, and in 
fact rendered possible, large editions from 
stone which in former times found their 
way to the type press, with very inferior re- 
sults. .By this change the general public 
have profited largely. 

Chromo-lithography, the highest develop- 
ment of the lithographic art, differs only 
from the ordinary processes in the imposi- 
tion of a number of impressions in different 
colors from as many different stones upon a 
sheet of paper, the combination of colors 
making a finished picture. An outline draw- 
ing is transferred to each stone required to 
complete the picture, so as to secure exact- 
ness in the co-relation of all parts on each 
stone. Upon these stones the artist draws 



140 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



the different tints and colors, the number 
varying with the character of the picture. 
Mr. Prang's famous chromo, " Family Scene 
in Pompeii," occupied forty-three stones. 
An artist must have a high degree of skill 
in drawing, a tine feeling for and thorough 
knowledge of color, and must be able to tell 
\\h;ii number of stones will be required, 
what the order of the tints and colors, what 
effect one tint will have upon the succeed- 
ing ones. Careful register is required, so 
that each color may fall in its proper place 
in the picture. 

Senefelder died in 1834. Every phase of 
the lithographic art described in the fore- 
going was indicated, originated, or practiced 
by him. The development and perfection of 
the present day, in every branch of his great 
invention, would gratify and astonish him 
infinitely. He would gaze in amazement at 
the lithographic power-press printing thou- 
sands of sheets daily, and would be lost in 
admiration at the sight of a chromo which 
he would confound with the original paint- 
ing, and which his art has placed within 
the reach of every one. All this he would 
readily comprehend ; j>/jofolithography alone 
would be to him a mystery and a revelation. 

PHOTOGRAPHY. 

The art of photography is entirely em- 
braced within the century. The solitary 
fact bearing upon the subject, and known to 
the world previous to 1776, was that horn- 
silver (fused chloride of silver) is blackened 
by exposure to the sun's rays. It is now 
known that many bodies are photo-chemic- 
ally sensitive in a greater or less degree, 
but some of the salts of silver and chromic 
acid in conjunction with organic matter are 
pre-eminently so, and are used practically 
to the exclusion of all others. 

Scheele in 1777 drew attention to the ac- 
fcivity of the violet and blue rays as compared 
with the rest of the spectrum ; and Ritter in 
1801 proved the existence of dark rays be- 
yond the violet end of the visible spectrum 
by the power they possessed of blackening 
chloride of silver. Wollaston experimented 
upon gum-guaiacum. Wedgwood, previous 
to 1802, was the first to produce a photo- 
graph, in the technical sense of the word; 
this was a negative of an engraving which 
was laid over a sheet of paper moistened 



with a solution of nitrate of silver. Such a 
picture had to be carefully preserved from 
daylight, or the whole surface woidd black- 
en. Neither Wedgwood, nor Davy, who ac- 
companied with observations the memoran- 
dum of Wedgwood to the Royal Society, 
devised any mode of fixing the image. 

From 1814 to 1827 Joseph Nicdphore 
Niepce, of Chalons on the Sa6ne, experi- 
mented on the subject. In the latter year 
he communicated his process. He coated a 
plate of metal or glass with a varnish of as- 
phaltum dissolved in oil of lavender, and ex- 
posed it under an engraving or in a camera ; 
the sunlight so affected the bitumen that 
the parts corresponding to the white por- 
tions of the picture or image remained upon 
the plate when those not exposed to light 
were subsequently dissolved by oil of bitu- 
men and washed away. This was a perma- 
nent negative picture. In 1829 Niepce as- 
sociated himself with Daguerre. 

In 1834 Fox Talbot commenced his inves- 
tigations, and in January, 1839, announced 
his calotype process. He prepared a sheet 
of paper with iodide of silver, dried it, and 
just before use covered the surface with a 
solution of nitrate of silver and gallic acid, and 
dried it again. Exposure in the camera 
produced no visible effect, but the latent 
image was developed by a re-application of 
the gallo-nitrate, and finally fixed by bromide 
of potassium, washed and dried. A negative 
so obtained was laid over a sensitized paper, 
and thus a positive print was obtained. This 
was a wonderful advance. 

In the same month, January, 1839, Da- 
guerre's invention was announced, but was 
not described till July of that year. In the 
daguerreotype, which has made the name of 
the inventor a household word, and furnish- 
ed a test of skill in all the spelling schools 
of the United States, polished silver-surfaced 
plates are coated with iodide of silver by 
exposure to the fumes of dry iodine, then 
exposed in the camera, and the latent image 
developed by mercurial fumes, which attach 
themselves to the iodide of silver in quanti- 
ties proportional to the actinic action. The 
picture is fixed by hyposulphite of soda, which 
prevents farther change by light. 

Goddard in 1839 introduced the use of 
bromine vapor conjointly with that of iodine 
iu sensitizing the silver surface. 



PHOTOGRAPHY. 



141 




BELLOWS CAMERA. 

The addition of chlorine was hy Claudet 
in 1840. M. Fizeau applied the solution of 
gold, which combined with the finely divided 
mercury, and in part replaced it. 

In 1848 M. Niepce de St. Victor coated 
glass with albumen, and treated it with ni- 
trate of silver to sensitize and coagulate it. 
The film hardened in drying and furnished 
a negative from which pictures might be 
printed by light. 

The collodion process, by Scott Archer, of 
London, was one of the most remarkable 
inventions of the series, and has made pho- 
tography the most important art industry 
of the world. A plate of glass is cleaned, 
floated with collodion, sensitized with io- 
dides and bromides, usually of potassium. 
It is then plunged in a solution of nitrate 
of silver. Metallic silver takes the place 
of the potassium, and forms insoluble io- 
dide and bromide of silver in the film, 
which assumes a milky appearance. The 
plate is exposed in the camera, and the 
latent image developed by an aqueous solu- 
tion of protosulphate of iron, the picture 
gradually emerging by a dark deposit 
forming upon those places where the 
light has acted, the density of this de- 
posit being directly proportional to the 
energy of the chemical rays. When suf- 
ficiently developed, the plate is washed 
with water, and fixed by washing away 
the free silver salt by a solvent, such as 
the cyanide of potassium or hyposul- 
phite of soda. This removes the milky 
character of the film, and leaves the pic- 
ture apparently resting on bare glass. 

To produce positive photographic prints 
from such a negative a sensitized sheet 
of j>aper is placed beneath the negative, 
and exposed to the sun's rays. The light 
passes through the negative in quantity 
depending upon the transparency of its 
several parts, and produces a proportion- 
ate darkening of the silver salts in the 



albuminous surface of the paper. The paper 
is now washed to remove the unaltered ni- 
trate, toned by a salt of gold, fixed by hypo- 
sulphite of soda, washed, dried, mounted, 
and glazed. 

The solar camera is used for making en- 
larged prints from a negative, a is an ad- 
justable portion, having a central aperture 
at which the negative is exposed to the rays 
entering at the window, b ; c is the lens ; d 
the board for the paper enlargement. 

Space can not be spared for even the reci- 
tation of the names of the various processes 
which have from time to time been promi- 
nently before the public. Some of these 
were invented in the infancy of the art, and 
have been long superseded by more perfect 
methods ; others yet survive for certain 
purposes. 

The amurotype is a thin collodion negative 
on glass made by a short exposure, and de- 
veloped so as to produce as white a deposit 
as possible on the lights. Such a picture is 
not looked at by transmitted Light, nor is it 
valuable as a negative ; it is to be backed 
up with a black surface, generally a black 
varnish, and regarded by reflected light only. 
Under these circumstances it appears as a 
positive, the deposit reflecting and the black 
backing absorbing the light. Pictures of 
this kind are rapidly made, and finished di- 
rect from the camera, as is the case with the 
daguerreotype, while the cost is very much 
less. They are, however, very inferior to 




ENLARGING SOLAR CAMERA. 



142 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



good positives on paper, and bad to make 
way for the latter as the negative process 
improved. 

Ambrotypes are rarely to be met with 
now, but ferrotypes, or tintypes, as they are 
sometimes called, are produced by a per- 
fectly analogous process, the substantial 
difference being tbat the collodion picture 
is made directly upon a thin iron plate cov- 
ered with a black enamel or lacquer, which 
protects both its surfaces from the action 
of the negative bath, and acts the part of 
the black backing used in the ambrotype. 

Ferrotypes are still in vogue, the quickness 
with which they can be produced and their 
exceedingly small cost making them popu- 
lar with the public. Cameras provided with 
a large number of lenses are employed in 
their production. 

The trouble and difficulty in the efficient 
working of collodion negatives out-of-doors 
created a desire for a means of preserving a 
collodion plate in a sensitive condition, so as 
to render it unnecessary to coat, sensitize, 
and develop the plate where the landscape 
is taken. Accordingly a number of preserv- 
ative and dry-plate processes have been in- 
vented. No dry process, however, gives re- 
sults fully equal in quality to the work from 
wet plates, but they offer other advantages 
which can not be ignored. 

The stereoscopic camera used for field 
work has an arrangement for instantaneous 
exposure of the two lenses, which admit 
pencils of beams to the plates in the binary 
chamber. Shutters are placed in front of 
each tube, so arranged that by touching a 
spring they are simultaneously rotated, 
bringing for an instant of time a hole in 




BTKISEOSOOriO CAMERA. 



each shutter in correspondence with the 
tube, admitting rays of light from the object 
to the sensitized surfaces in the interior. 

The first daguerreotype portrait from life 
was taken by Professor John W. Draper, of 
New York, in 1839. An announcement of it 
was made in the London and Edinburgh Phil- 
osophical Magazine in March, 1840. A full 
account of the operation was subsequently 
published in the same journal. He also 
took the first daguerreotype view in Ameri- 
ca, a view of the Church of the Messiah, 
from a window of the New York University. 
In his laboratory Professor Morse learned 
the art. 

Daguerre made an unsuccessful attempt 
to photograph the moon. Dr. J. W. Draper 
succeeded in 1840 in obtaining a photo- 
graph of the moon on a silver plate with a 
telescope of five inches aperture. He pre- 
sented specimens to the New York Lyceum 
of Natural History in 1840. Professor G. P. 
Bond, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, made 
photographs of the moon in 1850 with the 
Cambridge refractor of fifteen inches aper- 
ture. Many others followed. Mr. Ruther- 
ford's photographs of the moon are most 
excellent. Mr. Delarue, in England, must 
also be mentioned. 

PHOTOLITHOGRAPHY. 

Photolithography is a mode of producing 
by photographic means designs on stone 
from which impressions may be obtained in 
the ordinary lithographic press. 

The first attempts in this line were by 
Dixon, of Jersey City, and Lewis, of Dublin, 
in 1841 ; they were followed by several in- 
ventors in Paris, Vienna, and Rome. 

Their experiments were with resins di- 
rectly upon stone. Joseph Dixon, 1854, was 
the first to use organic matter and bichro- 
mate of potash upon stone to produce a pho- 
tolithograph. Poitevin was the first to rec- 
ognize the fact that bichromated organic 
matter altered by light took the greasy ink 
from the roller. No great measure of suc- 
cess was attained by operations with resins 
and directly upon stone. The various gela- 
tine processes have been more successful. 
Wit hunt ignoring the value of some of these, 
not particularly described here, it will be 
well for brevity's sake to describe the best 
process, and but one. 



OSBORNE'S PROCESS. 



143 




OSBORNE'S OOrTING CAMERA AND TABLE. 



J. W. Osborne patented in Australia Sep- 
tember 1, 1859, and in the United States Juno 
25, 1861, a transfer process, in which he pre- 
pares a sheet of paper by coating one side 
with a mixture of albumen, gelatine, and 
bichromate of potash, and dries it in the 
dark. This is exj)osed under a negative, 
whereby a visible change is produced, the 
brilliant yellow of the sheet, due to the salt 
of chromium, being changed to a chestnut- 
brown. In addition to this visible change, 
the organic matter becomes insoluble. A 
coating of transfer-ink is now applied to the 
whole exposed surface by passing the sheet 
through the press, face down, upon an inked 
stone. When the sheet is removed the pho- 
tographic picture is almost invisible. The 
sheet is then floated, ink side upward, upon 
hot water, the action of which is to coagu- 
late the albumen, rendering it insoluble, and 
to swell and soften the gelatine, causing the 
part affected by light to appear depressed 
by contrast. The sheet of paper so floated 
is next placed upon a slab, and the superflu- 
ous ink rubbed off by a wet sponge. This 
operation develops the picture. The sheet 
is then washed, dried, and transferred to the 
stone in the usual way. The coagulated al- 
bumen forms over the whole surface of the 
paper a continuous film, which adheres 
strongly to the stone during the transfer 



process, preventing any shifting and conse- 
quent doubling of the lines. This is, for all 
practical purposes, the first successful photo- 
lithographic process, and has been used in 
the Crown Lands Survey Office of Victoria 
since September, 1859, in the publication of 
maps. Substantially the same process is 
used in the Ordnance Survey Office of En- 
gland. The duplication and copying of 
drawings for the United States Patent-of- 
fice has been for some years performed by 
this process, which, in accuracy and speed, 
leaves nothing to be desired. 

The copying camera employed in making 
negatives from drawings is shown in the 
figure. The camera (containing the nega- 
tive plate) and the plan-board, on which is 
tacked the drawing to be copied, are adjust- 
able on a table, which is tilted on its truck 
to give the drawing a good presentation to 
the light. The focusing is done by a thin 
metallic belt, giving a rapid and positive 
movement on either side of the problemat- 
ical focus. The table is always brought into 
a horizontal position in focusing, the end of 
the camera box being covered by a hood, 
under which the operator stands. So placed, 
he controls the positions both of the plan- 
board and the lens, and has the ground glass 
always at a convenient distance from him. 
In copying at or near full scale the position 



144 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



of the lens affects the size of the picture, 
making little change in the sharpness of 
the focus, which latter operation is then 
done with the plan-board. When a large re- 
duction is required, the position of the plan- 
board affects the size, and the focusing is 
done with the lens. 

MISCELLANEOUS PHOTO PROCESSES. 

Besides the processes which have been 
described under the titles Photography and 
Photolithography, there are a number of oth- 
ers which should not be entirely overlooked. 
The processes yet remaining to be stated 
depend upon the use of gelatine. 

Mungo Pontou in 1839 first discovered the 
sensitiveness to light of a sheet of paper 
treated with bichromate of potash. Bec- 
querel in 1840 determined that the sizing 
of the paper played an important part in 
the change. Fox Talbot in 1853 discover- 
ed and utilized the insolubility of gelatine 
exposed to light in the presence of a bi- 
chromate. Dissolve gelatine in hot water, 
add to the solution some bichromate of pot- 
ash and dry it; the compound is sensitive to 
light in a way different from ordinary pho- 
tographic paper. If a photographic nega- 
tive on glass be laid over a sheet of this pre- 
pared gelatine, the portions shielded from 
light by the dark parts of the picture will 
dissolve as readily as before, while the parts 
acted on by light will form a tough tawny 
substance unaffected by hot water. 

From this point the gelatine processes 
naturally divide into two groups. 

1. The first group includes carbon printing. 
Poitevin, in 1855, was the first to use carbon 
combined with gelatine as a vehicle, avail- 
ing himself of its insoluble character after 
exposure. This process is as follows : Paper 
is coated with a compound of bichromate of 
potash, gelatine, aud lamp-black dissolved 
in cold water. This paper is dried in a dark 
room, exposed beneath a negative, and the 
parts not affected by the actinic action of 
the light dissolved off by hot water. The 
resulting picture is a positive print in black 
and white, of which the shades are produced 
by flit- carbon of the lamp-black, blackest 
where the lighl acted must freely, and with 
all the various shades according to the rela- 
tive translucency of the different portions 
of the negative. Poitevin subsequently in- 



troduced a process for carbon printing un- 
der a positive. The process was materially 
improved by Swann about 1861. He trans- 
ferred the film, after exposure, to another 
surface with the face downward, so that the 
dissolving was effected from its back, after 
which it was retransferred to the paper, on 
which it remained. 

2. The picture is produced by the action 
of light on bichromated gelatine, and is made 
(«) to produce a print capable of being trans- 
ferred ; or (6) to serve as a printing matrix, 
from which impressions may be taken by 
the ordinary lithographic means; or (c) to 
obtain an impression in relief which may 
be printed from in the ordinary printing- 
press. 

(a) The first success in this line resulted 
in the process of photolithography, which 
has been considered. 

(b) Paul Pretsch in 1854 discovered and 
utilized the quality which a sheet of bi- 
chromated gelatine possessed of not swell- 
ing in water after exposure to light. Poite- 
vin, 1855, was the first to recognize the fact 
that bichromated organic matter altered 
by light took greasy ink from the roller. 
Tessie" du Motay and Marechal, in 1864, were 
the first to print from a photographic image 
on bichromated gelatine as from a litho- 
graphic stone. 

The Albert-type, named from Albert, of Mu- 
nich, the autotype, the heUotype, by Edwards, 
now worked by J. R. Osgood, of Boston, and 
many others might be cited, differing in 
minor respects. Edwards, in the heliotype, 
produced a movable film; by the addition 
of chrome-alum to the gelatiue a tough, 
tawny, insoluble sheet is formed, capable 
of standing rough usage, and yet retaining 
its property of being acted on by light in 
the presence of a bichromate, and of re- 
ceiving and refusing greasy ink. The sheet 
is exposed under a negative, mounted on 
a metallic plate, the superfluous chemicals 
washed out, and then printed from with lith- 
ographic ink on an ordinary platen printing- 
press, being damped between each impres- 
sion, as in ordinary lithographic printing. 

(c) Relief-work is produced in several dif- 
ferent ways, but can not here be described. 
Niepce de St. Victor in 1827 led the way by 
an asphalt inn and etching process. 

The photoglijptk process of Fox Talbot, 



PHOTO-MICROGRAPHY. 



145 



1852, was another etching process. The pho- 
togalvanograph of Pretsch, 1854, depended 
upon the swelling of the gelatine after ex- 
posure ; a matrix was taken in gutta-percha, 
and from this a cameo plate was obtained 
by electro-deposit. The phototype belongs 
to this sub-class. Poitevin in 1855 had a 
process somewhat resembling this, in which 
he obtained a cast by the use of plaster 
hardened with protosulphate of iron. Os- 
borne in 1860 transferred the inked gelatine 
sheet to zinc, and etched to make a relief. 

In the Woodbury process, from which such 
excellent results have been obtained for il- 
lustrating the Medical and Surgical History 
of the War, the gelatine picture in relief, ob- 
tained by light, is placed in contact with a 
sheet of soft metal, and subjected to heavy 
hydraulic pressure. This gives a picture 
in reversed relief and depression. Such a 
mould is deeper in the places answering to 
the shades in the original picture, and con- 
versely, shallower in the lights. It is filled 
with a solution of colored gelatine in hot 
water; a piece of paper is placed on top 
and pressed down with a level lid, so as to 
squeeze out the superfluous gelatine. The 
paper is then lifted, bringing with it the 
colored gelatine, which forms the picture. 

PHOTO-MICROGRAPHY. 
The co-application of the microscope and 
photographic process has led to wonderful 
results, which we may briefly illustrate by 
an example. Merely referring to the early 
attempts of Donne", and the experiments of 
Gerlach, Albert, and Maddox in Europe, and 
of Rood and Rutherford in America, we may 
describe the plan adopted by Colonel J. J. 
Woodward, M. D., of the United States 
Army Medical Museum in Washington. 
He dispenses with a camera and ground 
glass. The operating-room has two win- 
dows, through one of which sufficient yel- 
low light is admitted to enable the oper- 
ator to work ; the lower part of the other 
window is provided with a shutter four- 
teen inches high, the upper part being 
blackened. In the shutter is a hole in 
which is inserted a tube, a, through 
which the solar light reflected from a 
plane mirror, b, or, preferably, a heliostat, 
is thrown upon the achromatic condenser 
of the microscope, c, which is placed on a 
10 



shelf at the window of the dark room. The 
light reflected through the tube, which is 
provided with an achromatic lens of about 
ten inches focal length, is thrown upon the 
achromatic condenser, d is the focusing 
device ; g f, the negative holder and its 
stand. 

For powers from 200 to 500, a ^-inch ob- 
jective without an eye-piece is used, the 
power being varied by increasing or dimin- 
ishing the distance of the sensitized plate 
from the instrument. A cell filled with am- 
monio-sulphate of copper, which absorbs the 
non-actinic rays, is interposed between the 
large lens and the condenser, and a hood is 
drawn around the instrument to prevent 
any loss of light. 

For objects magnified less than 500 diam- 
eters the time of exposure, being less than 
a second, is regulated by a sliding shutter 
placed before a slit in front of the micro- 
scope, the width of the slit being adjusted 
to correspond with the required length of 
exposure. For powers between 500 and 
1500 a jJg-inch objective is employed, dis- 
pensing in general with an eye-piece or am- 
plifier, and placing the sensitized plate at 
a distance not exceeding three to four feet 
from the microscope. In the case of objects 
having very minute details, however, it is 
frequently advantageous to employ an eye- 
piece or amplifier rather than enlarge a neg- 
ative taken with a smaller power. 

Though natural sunlight is to be pre- 
ferred, it may be sometimes necessary, when 
this is wanting, to employ artificial illumi- 
nation. For this purpose the electric, the 
magnesium, and the oxy- calcium lights 
have been used with success. Of these the 




WOODWARD'S MICRO-PHOTOGRAPHIC APPARATUS 
(WITH SOLAR LIGHT). 



146 



MECHANICAL PROGRESS. 



electric light is the hest, and for its pro- 
duction Dr. Woodward employs a Duboscq 
lamp, operated by a battery of fifty small 
Grove elements, ten in a cell. 

OltJl 3oM\,Vi which, aAi m> 
AecvMn AaUovbicL 0-e. Vii% 

7a\. mil frttfmtrn eafofru 

Ifub ckoii on dadty yitaa cma 

xtaum^ W-aMd lead uf rw+ 

fakh 4emfi?ah<m> bui dtufrt/ts 

THE LORD'S PBAYEE. 

The accompanying figure is a fac-simile 
of a photograph obtained by the instrument 
just described. It is an enlargement on a 
scale of 617 diameters from a writing on 
glass by Webb, of London, for the United 
States Army Medical Museum. The writ- 



ing was executed with a diamond point by 
an instrument of Mr. Webb's invention, and 
known as a micro-pantograph. 

The glass slip also contains the following 
inscription in a larger writing: "Webb's 
Test. The Lord's Prayer. 227 letters in 
the 5 J ? x ;jj r of an inch, or the r og^s* of a 
square inch, and at the rate of 29,431,458 let- 
ters to an inch, which is more than 8 Bibles, 
the Bible containing 3,566,480 letters." 

The area within which the prayer was 
written was micrometrically verified by Dr. 
Woodward, who found that it and the 
above inscription were contained within a 
space 1^5 of an inch square. 

According to a statement made in 1862 
by Mr. Farrants, president of the Micro- 
scopical Society of London, Mr. Peters has 
succeeded in writing the Lord's Prayer so 
as to be distinctly legible, with sufficient 
magnifying power, within the space of 
asMoo of a square inch. 



III. 

PROGRESS IN MANUFACTURE. 



WHAT ARE MANUFACTURES ? 

IN a general but correct sense all prod- 
ucts suitable for use, resulting from tbe 
applications, through human hand or brain, 
of the forces of nature to matter are man- 
ufactures, and each person who takes part in 
effecting or directing such applications is 
a manufacturer. Thus the laborer in the 
field who prepares the soil, scatters the seed, 
and harvests the grain, the wagoner, the 
railroad employe^ or the sailor who trans- 
ports it to the mill, are, in truth, as much 
the makers {facturcrs) of the flour as the 
men who, standing at the door of the mill, 
receive the grain, pass it through machin- 
ery, and when changed in form pack and 
deliver it to the consumers. No one of all 
these intermediaries between the first step 
in the so-called process of production — i. e., 
the leading or drawing forth {pro and ducc) 
— and the final use of the product, which 
we call consumption, at any time makes any 
thing in the sense of creating, but is only 
the agent, more or less skilled, for directing 
one or more of a series of movements, each 
of which differs from the other in degree, 
but not in kind. For convenience, how- 
ever, all these movements are economically 
divided into groups or classes, under such 
general names as agriculture, mining, com- 
merce, the fisheries, and manufactures — the 
last name being more especially applied to 
designate those movements which have 
reference to the changing or elaborating, 
through the aid of machinery, of those forms 
of product which have been the result of 
previous movements effected under the de- 
partments of agriculture and mining, and 
to some extent also of the fisheries. 

SOURCES OP INFORMATION. 

In the sense of the definition, as thus giv- 
en, there are no available data for making 
any thing like a complete exhibit of the 
gradual development of the manufacturing 
industry of the American people, not only, 
as might be expected, for so much of the 
period of their history as is antecedent to 



the adoption of the Federal Constitution 
and the full organization and adjustment 
of the affairs of the new nation, but what 
is more remarkable, and at the same time 
not generally known, for so much of the 
present century also as is antecedent to 
the year 1850, at which date the govern- 
ment of the United States for the first time, 
through the census, attempted to ascertain, 
with even approximative accuracy, the ex- 
act industrial statistics of the country. The 
requirement of the Federal Constitution 
(adopted in convention in 1787) that an 
"enumeration" (of the people) "shall be 
made within three years after the first 
meeting of the Congress of the United 
States, and within every subsequent term 
of ten years" — being the first provision of 
the kind instituted in connection with the 
constitution of any government 1 — only con- 
templated the obtaining of information re- 
specting population for the ulterior purpose 
of apportioning representation and direct 
taxation. The returns, accordingly, of the 
first census, taken in 1790, and of the sec- 
ond census, taken in 1800, afforded no infor- 
mation whatever concerning either the ag- 
gregate wealth of the country, the occupa- 
tions of the people, or the nature and value 
of their annual product. It is to be noted, 
however, that previous to the enactment of 
the census law of 1800 some public citizens, 
engaged in scientific and philosophical pur- 

1 Moreau de Jonn6s, a distinguished French econo- 
mist, refers to this provision of the Constitution of 
the United States in the following language: "The 
United States presents in its history a phenomenon 
which has no parallel. It is that of a people who in- 
stituted the statistics of their country on the very day 
when they formed their government, and who regu- 
lated in the same instrument the census of their citi- 
zens, their civil and political rights, and the destinies 
of the country." This eulogium was, however, hard- 
ly warranted ; for there is no evidence that the framers 
of the Constitution in creating a census ever contem- 
plated any other object than an enumeration of the 
people, as furnishing a basis for the apportionment 
of representation and direct taxes. But " they build- 
ed wiser than they knew," inasmuch as they provided 
an instrumentality by which in the future the most 
vital questions pertaining to the political and social 
interests of the state could alone be answered. 



148 



PROGRESS IN MANUFACTURE. 



suits, sought t( prevail on Congress to make 
the census of that year something more 
than a mere enumeration of the popula- 
tion ; and two learned societies, namely, the 
American Philosophical Society, of which 
Thomas Jefferson was then president, and 
the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sci- 
ences, Timothy D wight, president, sent in 
memorials on the subject; but beyond re- 
ferring the memorials to a committee there 
is no record on the part of Congress of any 
further action. 

In ordering for the third census, that of 
1810, Congress, however, for the first time en- 
acted that, in addition to enumerating the 
people, it should be the duty of the mar- 
shals to take also, under the direction of the 
Secretary of the Treasury, an account of the 
" several manufacturing establishments and 
manufactures within their several districts," 
and set aside for this service the sum of 
$30,000, out of an aggregate of $150,000 pre- 
viously appropriated for the general pur- 
poses of taking the census. This latter sum, 
although seemingly small, was nevertheless 
considered to be amply sufficient to cover 
all the expenses of the third census ; and in 
comparison with an expenditure of nearly 
three and a half millions authorized by Con- 
gress in connection with the taking in 1870 
of the ninth census, strikingly illustrates 
the change in all the elements of national 
development effected between the two peri- 
ods. As further illustrating the same point, 
it may be also interesting to note that the 
report of the first census was comprised in 
an octavo pamphlet of fifty-two pages, and 
that of the second census in a folio of sev- 
enty-eight pages, while the report of the 
ninth census required three large quarto 
volumes of 679, 851, and 806 pages respect- 
ively, besides a statistical atlas. 

As the first attempt to set forth the con- 
dition of American manufacturing industry 
in detail, the results of the third census were 
looked for by Congress and the country with 
no little of interest ; but when the industrial 
returns were sent in they proved so imper- 
fect and discordant that the Committee of 
Commerce and Manufactures on the part of 
the House of Representatives, to whom they 
were referred, reported, through one of its 
members, that it was impossible to arrange 
them in any form which would bo "alike 



useful and compendious." In accordance 
with a joint resolution they were therefore 
referred to the Secretary of the Treasury — 
then Mr. Gallatin — with instructions to 
place the entire returns in the hands of 
some person competent to make a digest of 
them; and for this purpose the Secretary 
subsequently selected Mr. Tench Coxe, of 
Philadelphia, who in 1813 submitted a re- 
port, which, although from necessity most 
imperfect, was nevertheless of great interest 
and value. How imperfect the material 
placed at the disposal of Mr. Coxe really 
was may be inferred from the circumstance 
that not even an attempt was made under 
the census of 1810 to take an account, under 
the head of manufactures, of the capital em- 
ployed, raw material, number of hands, or 
cost of labor ; but only the number of man- 
ufacturing establishments, the character of 
the machinery used, and the quantity and 
value of certain staple products, and of even 
these last the statistics collected were so ir- 
regular as to be nearly worthless. 

In 1820, on the occasion of the taking of 
the fourth census, an effort was again made 
to obtain statistics of industry ; but when 
the returns came in they were again found 
so discreditable that the Secretary of State 
was only constrained by the mandatory 
character of the law to permit their publi- 
cation ; and the House of Representatives, 
after debating the propriety of suppressing 
the entire document, refused to pass a reso- 
lution providing for its public distribution. 

The result of these two unsuccessful ef- 
forts was that in providing for the taking 
of the fifth census the attempt to collect 
any industrial statistics whatever was whol- 
ly abandoned ; and although in 1840 sched- 
ules for obtaining statistics of industry were 
issued to the marshals engaged in taking 
the sixth census, the results obtained were 
regarded as of little or no importance. 

The act of 1850, however, under which 
the seventh, eighth, and ninth censuses of the 
United States were taken, in the years 1850, 
1860, and 1870 respectively, marks an era in 
the history of American statistics, inasmuch 
as it not only incorporated provisions of law 
looking to the obtaining of results of sub- 
stantial value relative to domestic industry, 
but also for the first time so insured the of- 
ficial observance of the law that it became 



SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 



149 



possible to recognize the returns to a cer- 
tain extent as standards for making com- 
parisons and deductions in the future. And 
for such a result a debt of national gratitude 
is due, more than to all others, to the Hon. 
Joseph G. Kennedy, under whose superin- 
tendence the work of the censuses of 1850 
and of 1860 was chiefly performed. 

But commendable as were the returns of 
the census of 1850, those of 1860 were much 
more comprehensive and accurate ; while 
the ninth census, taken in 1870, under the su- 
perintendence of Hon. F. A. Walker, was not 
only very far superior iu every respect to 
any previous census of the United States, 
but also compares favorably with any work 
of the kind previously executed in any coun- 
try. At the same time it ought to be known 
that the returns of the ninth census were 
very far from being as complete and useful 
as they could and would have been had not 
personal and partisan spirit, overruling all 
considerations of national good, mainly on 
the part of one man, prevented Congress 
from adopting a new law, carefully prepared 
by a committee of the House of Representa- 
tives (with the assistance of the best statis- 
ticians of every department in the country), 
and subsequently passed by the House al- 
most unanimously, and so compelled the 
performance of the work under the old law, 
one of whose provisions required the enu- 
meration and valuation of slaves, when the 
institution of slavery had for years been 
abolished. 

But in addition to the reports of the cen- 
sus, the materials available for the prepara- 
tion of a history of American manufacturing 
industry are exceedingly varied, and if not 
complete, exact, and accordant, are at least 
invested with a high degree of interest. 
For the earlier periods, or for the first one 
hundred and fifty years of our national his- 
tory, the few particulars which can now be 
gathered are to be sought for mainly in co- 
lonial statutes and records, private corre- 
spondence, minutes of councils and assem- 
blies, local histories, and individual biogra- 
phies. In 1791 Alexander Hamilton, then 
Secretary of the Treasury, in obedience to a 
resolution of Congress, submitted his famous 
report on domestic manufactures and their 
relations to the new Federal government, 
in which, without entering into details, he 



gave an enumeration of such branches of in- 
dustry under this head as seemed to bim at 
that time to be permanently established in 
the country. Hamilton's report was follow- 
ed in 1813 by the work of Tench Coxe, of 
Philadelphia, above referred to ; while in 
1816 Timothy Pitkin, a Representative in 
Congress from the State of Connecticut from 
1808 to 1819, published, under the title of A 
Statistical View of the Commerce of the United 
States, including also an Account of Banks, 
Manufactures, and Internal Trade, what at the 
time of the appearance of the first edition, 
and long subsequent also to the second edi- 
tion in 1835, held rank as the most compre- 
hensive and authoritative commercial and 
statistical work of American origin. At 
present the most complete repertory of facts 
concerning the rise and progress of Ameri- 
can manufactures is to be found in the work 
of the late Dr. J. L. Bishop, of Philadelphia, 
entitled A History of American Manufactures 
from 1608 to 1860 — three volumes; in addi- 
tion to which there have also been from time 
to time important publications by various au- 
thors on specialties of manufactures and the 
mechanic arts, as Thomas's History of Print- 
ing, White's Memoirs of Slater, Batchelder on 
the Cotton Manufacture of the United States, 
Munsell's Chronology of Paper and Paper-mak- 
ing, as well as numerous statistical reports 
from special industrial associations, as the 
American Iron and Steel Association, Nation- 
al Association of American Cotton and Wool- 
en Manufacturers, etc., etc. Within a com- 
paratively recent period, also, many of the 
States have prepared and published, every 
five years subsequent to the national cen- 
sus, very full details of their local domestic 
industries ; and as the principle that healthy 
legislation can only flow from an exact 
knowledge of the condition and wants of 
the people has gradually obtained public 
recognition, the establishment of distinct 
bureaus of statistics, reporting every year 
with great minuteness of detail the particu- 
lars of all important industrial occupations, 
is beginning to be regarded as an indispen- 
sable adjunct of all State governments. 

With this brief review of the sources of 
information available for studying the his- 
tory of our national industrial progress, at- 
tention is next asked to the subject of the 
origin and development of American manu- 



150 



PROGRESS IN MANUFACTURE. 



factures from the period of the first settle- 
ment in Virginia, in 1607-8, to the dissolu- 
tion of the colonial system by the Declara- 
tion of Independence and of nationality, in 
1776. 

PROGRESS FROM 1G07 TO 1776. 

And in reviewing the pertinent facts of 
this period the circumstance that in the 
first instance most forcibly arrests atten- 
tion is the strong natural tendency exhibit- 
ed from the very outset by the people who 
colonized and built up the American States 
to multiply and diversify their industries — 
a fact in striking contrast with and in oppo- 
sition to the opinion so assiduously main- 
tained by a school of American economists 
that such a result, among an intelligent 
people, inhabiting a country of varied re- 
sources, does not tend to occur naturally, 
but is rather the direct offspring of legis- 
lative direction and interference. 

Thus, for example, the second vessel dis- 
patched by the London Company, in 1608, 
to the settlement at Jamestown, Virginia 
(founded the previous year), brought num- 
bers of persons skilled in manufactures, of 
whom says the historian (Stith), "No soon- 
er were they landed, but the President dis- 
patched as many as were able, some to make 
glass, and others for pitch, tar, and soap- 
ashes ;" and the very first manufactory 
established within the territory now con- 
trolled by the United States was a "glass- 
house" (furnace) in the woods of Virginia, 
about a mile from the settlement of James- 
town. And it is further interesting to note 
that, with the exception of a cargo of " sas- 
safras" gathered in the vicinity of Cape 
Cod in 1608, the first export from the Brit- 
ish North American colonies consisted in 
great part of what in the most technical 
sense are termed "manufactures;" or, to use 
the quaint language of Captain John Smith 
in his letter which accompanied the invoice, 
"of trials of pitch, tar, glass, frankincense, 
and soap-ashes, with what wainscot and 
clapboard as could be forwarded." Bever- 
ley in his History of Virginia, writing of the 
condition of affairs twelve years later, or in 
1620, also says : " Many of the people became 
very industrious, and began to vie with one 
another in planting, building, and other im- 
provements. A salt-work was set up on the 
eastern shore and an iron-work at Falling 



Creek, on Jamestown River, where they 
made proof of good iron ore, and brought 
the whole work so near a perfection that 
they sent word to the company in London 
that they did not doubt but to push the 
work, and have plentiful provision of iron 
for them by next Easter." 

From the very first, under the popular im- 
pression probably that the country was par- 
ticularly adapted to the production of silk, 
special efforts were made in nearly all the 
colonies to direct and divert the attention of 
the people to this particular industry ; and 
it is recorded that the first Assembly that 
convened in Virginia under a written con- 
stitution, in 1621, especially occupied itself 
with considering "how best to encourage 
the silk culture." In 1662 also the Virginia 
Assembly, with a view of encouraging man- 
ufactures, offered prizes for the best speci- 
mens of linen and woolen cloth, and a spe- 
cial prize of fifty pounds of tobacco for each 
pound of wound silk produced in the colo- 
ny ; and it was also enjoined that for every 
hundred acres of land held in fee, the pro- 
prietor should be required to plant and 
fence twelve mulberry-trees. Silk culture 
in Georgia also so largely occupied the atten- 
tion of the first colonists that a public seal 
was adopted bearing as a device silk-worms 
engaged in their labors ; while bounties for 
the encouragement of the same industry 
were repeatedly offered by the colonies of 
Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, North 
and South Carolina. The extraordinary ef- 
forts thus made resulted in some degree of 
success. Small lots of Virginia silk were 
sent to England as early as 1660, and, ac- 
cording to tradition, formed part of the 
coronation robes of Charles II. Raw silk 
for a considerable number of years became 
also one of the regular exports from Georgia, 
and for the eighteen years next subsequent 
to 1750 the amount so exported averaged 
about 550 pounds per annum. In Con- 
necticut the production and manufacture 
of silk was made a matter of special legis- 
lation as early as 1732 ; and in 1747 it is re- 
corded that the Governor, Mr. Law, had a 
silk coat and stockings entirely of domestic 
manufacture. It is, however, a most inter- 
esting and suggestive circumstance that 
this specialty of employment, which from 
the first settlement of the country was par- 



COLONIAL PROGRESS. 



151 



ticularly selected as worthy of attention, 
and as such did receive for nearly two 
hundred years from the various colonial 
and State authorities an amount of encour- 
agement, through special legislation, great- 
er than was bestowed on any other interest, 
is the only one of the great industries which 
has never been able to attain to a healthy 
condition of existence on the North Ameri- 
can continent, and to-day only exists in the 
United States in virtue of a degree of legis- 
lative encouragement far in excess of that 
demanded and received by any other indus- 
trial interest. 

But zealously as did the first settlers of 
Virginia engage at the outset in manufac- 
tures, the characteristics of the territory 
upon which they located, in respect to fer- 
tility of soil and mildness of climate, proved 
antagonistic ; and obeying the promptings 
of self-interest, which are always a far bet- 
ter and surer guide than legislation for de- 
termining what occupations individuals as 
well as communities can best follow, they in 
common with the population of all the oth- 
er Southern colonies early became planters 
rather than artisans. And from that day to 
this American manufacturing industry has 
found its greatest development in other 
and less fertile localities. It has also been 
noted as somewhat prophetic of the tastes 
and tendencies of the different sections of 
the future nation into which all the colo- 
nies were subsequently blended, that the 
first book written and the first book print- 
ed in what is now the United States were 
in verse — the one a translation of Ovid's 
Metamorphoses, by Mr. George Sandys, 
Treasurer of Virginia, and the other the 
Bay Psalm-Book, in New England. 

Strenuous efforts were indeed made by 
the authorities to arrest the tendency of the 
people of Virginia to engage in agriculture 
rather than in manufactures or commerce, 
and in 1689 it was even ordered that all the 
tobacco grown in the colony in excess of a 
certain quantity should be destroyed. But 
this and other efforts, like the offering of 
prizes for the encouragement of the produc- 
tion of textile fabrics, proved of no avail. 
Tobacco grew most luxuriously, and in 1617 
readily commanded three shillings per pound, 
and the Virginians soon found that it was, 
at least for the time, more advantageous to 



buy manufactured articles with the pro- 
ceeds of their crops than to manufacture 
for themselves. 

On the other hand, in New England the 
circumstances of a sterile soil and a harsh 
climate were antagonistic to agriculture and 
in favor of commerce and manufactures, and 
from a very early day powerfully contrib- 
uted to give to this section of country a 
supremacy in respect to the two last-named 
branches of industry which no subsequent 
influences have ever seriously impaired or 
threatened. The branch of manufacturing 
industry to which the attention of the New 
England colonists was first, and as it were 
naturally, directed, by reason of the inex- 
haustible wealth of their forests, was the 
manufacture of lumber, for which there was 
a constant and remunerative demand in 
England and throughout the West Indies. 
Ship-building commenced in the Plymouth 
Colony within three years after the landing, 
and the business subsequently received a 
great impulse by the overthrow of the mon- 
archy under Charles I. and the establish- 
ment of the Commonwealth, which led the 
colonists to apprehend that the incentive to 
emigration, and the consequent sailing of 
ships from England, being diminished, they 
would be thereby left dependent on their 
own resources for interoceanic communica- 
tions. "The general fear," says Governor 
Winthrop, in his journal, " of a want of for- 
eign commodities, now our money was gone, 
and that things were like to go well in En- 
gland, set us on work to provide shipping of 
our own ;" and the business was prosecuted 
with such vigor that within ten years after 
the launching of the first vessel ever built in 
Massachusetts, namely, on the 4th of July, 
1631, the General Court passed the follow- 
ing resolution : " Whereas, the country is 
now in hand with the building of ships, and 
therefore suitable care is been taken that it 
be well performed, it is therefore ordered 
that surveyors be appointed to examine any 
ship built, to see that it be performed and 
carried on according to the rules of the 
art." In the year 1676, just a century be- 
fore the Declaration of Independence^ 550 
vessels are reported to have been built in 
Boston and the vicinity, of which 230 ranged 
from 50 to 250 tons burden ; and in 1731 the 
trade of Massachusetts alone employed 600 



152 



PROGRESS IN MANUFACTURE. 



sail of ships and sloops, having an aggre- 
gate of 38,000 tonnage— one-half of which 
traded to Europe — in addition to over 1000 
sail and from 5000 to 6000 men employed at 
the same time in the fisheries. 

In 1640 the General Court of Connecticut 
enacted as follows : " It is thought neces- 
sary for the comfortable support of these 
plantations that a trade in cotten tvooll he 
sett upon and attempted, and for the fur- 
thering thereof it has pleaced the Governor 
that now is (Edward Hopkins, Esq.) to un- 
dertake the finishing and setting forth a 
vessell with convenient speed to those ports 
where the said commodity is to be had, if it 
be pheasable," etc. ; and in 1642 the Court 
further apportioned the amount of cotten 
wooll that each town should take from Mr. 
Hopkins, the share of Hartford being £200 
worth. In 1666 also the Assembly of Con- 
necticut, with an exceptional degree of wis- 
dom, which Great Britain long afterward 
imitated, as did the State of Pennsylvania 
in a degree in 1772, exempted ship-building 
from all local taxation. The business of 
constructing ships for home use and for 
sale in foreign countries was also exten- 
sively followed in nearly all the other col- 
onies, and in Maine and New Hampshire 
especially the manufacture of spars, masts, 
and ship timber for export early became a 
leading and profitable industry. 

The first saw-mill in New England is be- 
lieved to have been erected as early as 1634 
or 1635 on the Salmon Falls River, New 
Hampshire, near to the site of the present 
city of Portsmouth. The first water-mill in 
New England is supposed to have been put 
up at Dorchester, Massachusetts, as early 
as 1628 ; and in 1633 another was erected in 
the Plymouth Colony by one Stephen Dean, 
which he engaged should be sufficient to 
" beat" corn for the whole colony. The 
number of mills of various kinds that exist- 
ed in that part of Massachusetts which is 
now Maine as early as 1682 may be inferred 
from the circumstance that a tax was im- 
posed that year on mills for the defense of 
Fort Loyal against the French and Indians. 
The first Van Rensselaer sent from Holland 
to Albany as early as 1631 a master mill- 
wright and two small millstones for a small 
grist-mill. The first grist-mill in Pennsyl- 
vania was erected by Colonel John Printz, 



Governor of what was then called New Swe- 
den, in 1643. Virginia as early as 1649 had 
four windmills and five water-mills, besides 
many " horse-mills," and for a considerable 
number of years exported large quantities 
of breadstuflfs to her sister colonies and to 
the West Indies. 

The first printing-press in what is now 
the United States was set up at Cambridge, 
Massachusetts, in 1638, only eighteen years 
subsequent to the landing of the Pilgrims 
in the wilderness. The first thing printed 
was The Freeman's Oath, a broadside ; the 
second, an almanac, in 1639 ; and in 1640 the 
first book, "the Psalms newly turned into 
metre," or The Bay Psalm-Booh, as it was 
called — a work which is said to have gone 
through seventy editions. William Penn 
landed in his new territory of Pennsylvania 
in 1682, and four years later a printing-press 
— the third in the colonies — was at work in 
Philadelphia. The first press established in 
the Province of New York was in 1693, none 
having been allowed there during the rule 
of the Dutch. In Virginia the art of print- 
ing was not encouraged, and in 1683 is said 
to have been actually prohibited, while in 
1671 Sir William Berkeley, of Virginia, re- 
turned thanks to God that there were nei- 
ther free schools nor printing in the colony. 
"For learning has brought disobedience and 
heresy and sects, and printing has divulged 
them, and libels against the best govern- 
ment." The same year Governor Dongan, 
of New York, on the renewal of his commis- 
sion, was instructed " to allow no printing- 
press." The first printing-press in Con- 
necticut was established at New London 
in 1709; in Rhode Island, at Newport, in 
1713-14 ; in Delaware, at Annapolis, in 1726 ; 
in South Carolina, at Charleston, in 1730 ; in 
New Hampshire, at Portsmouth, in 1756 ; in 
North Carolina, at Newbern, in 1757; in 
Georgia, at Savanurth, in 1762 ; and in what 
is now the State of Maine in 1780. The first 
printing-press in the territory west of the 
Alleghanies was set up in Kentucky in 1786; 
the second, at Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1793 ; 
and the third, probably, at Marietta, Ohio, 
in 1795. 

The number of printing-presses in the 
colonies at the time of the Revolution is 
believed to have been about forty. The 
number of separate works printed in the 



PAPER MANUFACTURE. 



153 



provinces up to this period can not now be 
ascertained; but the Philadelphia Library 
contains as many as 459 works printed in 
that city alone prior to the Revolution. 

The first book-binding in this country ap- 
pears to have been an edition of 1000 copies 
of the Bible, published at Cambridge in 1663, 
which was followed by a second edition of 
2000 copies in 1685. The work was perform- 
ed by one John Ratlifte, who came from En- 
gland expressly for this purpose. His price 
was about 3s. Ad. per volume, and one Bible 
Avas as much as he could bind in one day. 

The manufacture of paper of any descrip- 
tion was not established in any of the colo- 
nies until full fifty years after the introduc- 
tion of printing, the first paper mill having 
been erected in the vicinity of Philadelphia 
by one William Rittenhousen, a native of 
Germany, about the year 1690. The first pa- 
per mill in New England was established in 
the town of Milton, near Boston, in 1730, by 
Daniel Henchman, Peter Faneuil, and oth- 
ers, with a privilege in the nature of a pat- 
ent for ten years from the General Court 
of Massachusetts, on condition that they 
should make in the first fifteen months 115 
reams of brown paper and sixty reams of 
printing-paper, and the third year writing- 
paper of a superior quality. In 1732 the 
following advertisement appeared in the 
weekly Rehearsal, of Boston : 

"Richard Fry, Stationer, Bookseller, Paper-maker, 
and Rag merchant, from the city of London, keeps at 
Mr. Thomas Fleet's, printer, at the Heart and Crown, 
in Cornhill, Boston, where said Fry is ready to accom- 
modate all Gentlemen, Merchants, and Tradesmen with 
setts of Accompt books after the most acute manner 
for twenty per cent, cheaper than they can have them 
from London. I return the Public Thanks for follow- 
ing the Directions of my former Advertisement for 
gathering rags, and hope they will continue the like 
Method, having received upward of Seven thousand 
weight already." 

The early scarcity of paper in the colo- 
nies is illustrated by the following curious 
advertisement, which appeared in the Bos- 
ton Evening Post in 1748 : 

" Choice Pennsylvania Tobacco paper is to be sold 
by the publisher of this paper at the Heart and Crown, 
where may be also had the Bulls or Indigencies of 
the present Pope, Urban VIII., either by the single 
Bull, Quire, or Ream, at a much cheaper rate than they 
can be purchased of the French or Spanish priests." 

The explanation of this was that several 
bales of " indulgencies," printed upon very 
good paper and only on one side, had been 



captured by an English cruiser from a Span- 
ish vessel, and being offered at a very low 
price, had been purchased by the Boston 
printer, who saw an opportunity for profit 
by printing ballads or other matter for his 
customers upon the backs of the pontifical 
documents in question. It is also to be 
noted that about this time Robert Salton- 
stall was fined five shillings by the General 
Court of Massachusetts for presenting a pe- 
tition on a small and bad piece of paper. 

In 1768 Colonel Christopher Leffingwell 
erected at Norwich the first paper mill in 
the colony of Connecticut" under the prom- 
ise of a bounty from the General Assembly. 
Two years after he was accordingly awarded 
twopence a quire on 4020 quires of writing- 
paper, and one penny each on 10,600 quires 
of printing-paper. Having attained such a 
degree of success, it is recorded that the 
government patronage was soon afterward 
withdrawn. 

In Pennsylvania the Dunkers, who set- 
tled in Lancaster County, very early gave 
their attention to the manufacture of paper, 
and also set up a printing-press. During 
the Revolution, and just previous to the bat- 
tle of the Brandy wine, messengers were sent 
to their mill for a supply of paper for car- 
tridges. The mill happening to be out of 
unmanufactured paper, the fraternity, who 
held their property in common, sent back 
as a substitute to the Continental army sev- 
eral wagon loads of an edition of Fox's Book 
of Martyrs, and from the paper supplied by 
the pages of this work the cartridges used 
in the battle were in part manufactured. 1 

About the year 1770 the number of paper 
mills in the provinces of Pennsylvania, New 
Jersey, and Delaware was reported to be 
forty, this department of manufacturing in- 
dustry having especially developed in the 
vicinity of Philadelphia, which was at that 
time the centre of literary activity for the 
colonies. It was a business, moreover, in 
which Dr. Franklin was greatly interested ; 
and he told De Warville, a French traveler 
who visited America in 1788, that he had 
himself established as many as eighteen 
mills. 

The business of the manufacture of " pa- 
per-hangings" commenced in the colonies 

1 Bishop's History of American Manufactures. 



154 



PROGRESS IN MANUFACTURE. 



about the year 1760, and in 1791 it was one 
of the branches of domestic industry, ac- 
cording to the report of the Secretary of 
the Treasury, which were well established. 
Samples of home manufacture, which were 
highly approved of, and which found a 
ready sale, were exhibited to the New York 
Society of Arts and Manufactures as early 
as 1765. 

The household manufacture of textile fab- 
rics — of cotton-wool, linen, and silk — was al- 
most coeval with the settlement of the con- 
tinent, and the same circumstances which 
have been before* noted as favoring the 
building of ships also greatly encouraged 
the development of these other industries. 
We are accustomed, and with good reason, 
to regard the tide and volume of immigra- 
tion which has flowed from the Old World 
to the New since 1850 as something most 
remarkable, but the largest comparative im- 
migration which this country has ever ex- 
perienced occurred during the first half of 
the seventeenth century, between 1630 and 
1640, when nearly every year added a num- 
ber of individuals nearly or quite equal to 
the previously existing population. The 
result was an extraordinary demand for 
provisions, not only for home consumption, 
but also for the West Indies, with which 
trade had been greatly fostered by the en- 
terprise of ship-building and the exporta- 
tion of lumber, and the attention of the 
colonists, especially in New England and 
in New York, was largely directed to the 
raising of cattle, and in the former also to 
the prosecution of the fisheries. Governor 
Hutchinson, indeed, records that at one time 
the price of cattle in the colonies rose as high 
as £ •-'•">, and even £28, per head. The ces- 
sation of immigration in 1640, consequent 
upon the cessation of persecution in En- 
gland for religious non-conformity, caused 
an immediate and excessive decline in the 
price of cattle, and as suddenly cut off a 
leading source of -provincial revenue. At 
the same time, with their thus impaired 
means of purchase, the diminished inter- 
course with England also caused great un- 
certainty in respect to the supply of cloth- 
ing, for which the colonists had been up to 
tliis time almost wholly dependent upon the 
mother country. What next happened, as 
told with quaint simplicity by the early his- 



torian of New England (Hubbard), striking- 
ly illustrates the state of things in which a 
resort to manufactures becomes a necessi- 
ty in a new country. After describing the 
manner in which their necessity first came 
upon them, he continues : 

"Now the country of New England was to seek of 
a way to provide themselves with clothing, which they 
could not obtain by selling cattle as before, which 
were now fallen from that huge price forementioned 
to five pounds apiece; nor was there at that rate a 
ready vent for them neither. Thus the flood which 
brought in much wealth to many persons, the contra- 
ry ebb carried all away out of their reach. To help 
themselves in this their exigent, for the necessary sup- 
ply of themselves and their families, the General Court 
made order for the manufacture of woolen and linen 
cloth, which with God's blessing upon man's endeav- 
or in a little time stopped this gap in part, and soon 
after another door was opened by special Providence ; 
for when one hand was shut by way of supply from 
England, another was opened by way of traffic, first to 
the West Indies and Wine Islands, whereby, among 
other goods, much cotton-wool was brought into the 
country, which the inhabitants, learning to spin and 
breeding of sheep and sewing of hemp and flax, they 
soon found out a way to supply themselves of cloth." 

The first regular or systematic attempt 
to manufacture cloth, particularly woolen, 
was made by a company of Yorkshire immi- 
grants who settled at Rowley, Massachu- 
setts, where in 1643 was erected the first 
fulling-mill in the North American colonies. 
The manufacture of cordage was entered, 
upon in Boston as early as 1629* In the 
New Netherlands (New York), although the 
primary object with the mercantile com- 
pany which planted and governed that col- 
ony was trade with the Indians, yet the 
characteristic industry of the Dutch prompt- 
ed to a very extensive household manufac- 
ture of linens, woolens, and hosiery; and 
Denton, the earliest writer in that province, 
says (1670) of them, "Every one make their 
own linen and a great part of their woolen 
cloth for their ordinary wear." Under the 
auspices of William Penn, the manufacture 
of (linen and woolen) cloth was one of the 
first branches of industry undertaken in his 
new colony ; and among the articles men- 
tioned as produced in Pennsylvania as early 
as 1698 (which daily improved in quality) 
were druggets, serges, camblets, and a va- 
riety of other stuff, giving employment to 
dyers, fullers, comb -makers, card -makers, 
weavers, spinners, etc. The general prog- 
ress made in the manufacture of fabrics dur- 
ing the first century of the existence of the 
North American colonies is also indicated by 



IRON. 



155 



a report which Colonel Heathcote, a member 
of the Council of the Province of New York, 
made to the English Board of Trade in 1708, 
in which he says that he had labored to di- 
vert the Americans from going on with their 
woolen and linen manufactures, which are 
already so far advanced that three-fourths 
of the linen and woolen used was made 
among them, " especially the coarse sort ; and 
if some speedy and effectual ways are not 
found to put a stop to it, they will carry it 
on a great deal further, and perhaps in time 
very much to the prejudice of our manufac- 
tures at home." And a letter written from 
New England to the Board of Trade in 1715 
dwells particularly on "the very consider- 
able manufacture" (in the colonies) " of ker- 
seys, liusey-woolseys, flannels, buttons, etc., 
by which the importations of these provinces 
has been decreased fifty thousand pounds 
Tier annum." 

The smelting of iron ore was one of the 
industries attempted by the first settlers 
in Virginia ; but both the iron-works and 
the " glass-house," which had been erected, 
were early destroyed by the Indians, who, 
although not versed in any system of po- 
litical economy, nevertheless ever showed 
themselves the most persistent enemies of 
diversified employments. In New England 
preliminary attempts to establish the man- 
ufacture of iron were made in 1630, and in 
1645 regular works were established at 
Lynn. Of these last the old historian (Hub- 
bard) says, contemptuously, " That instead 
of drawing out bars of iron for the country's 
use, there was hammered out nothing but 
contentions and lawsuits ;" but, notwith- 
standing this disparagement, the operations 
commenced in this locality are believed to 
have been conducted with a degree of suc- 
cess for a period of more than one hundred 
years. 

^One of the first, if not the very first pat- 
ent granted in this country was by the 
General Court of Massachusetts, in 1646, to 
one Joseph Jencks, of Lynn, " for y e making 
of Engines for mills to goe with water, for 
y e more speedy dispatch of work than for- 
merly, and mills for y e makiug of Sithes and 
other Edged Tooles," the Court having pre- 
viously passed a law that there " should be 
no monopolies but of such new inventions 
as were profitable to the country, and that 



for a short time only." The same Mr. Jencks, 
who is claimed to have been " the first found- 
er who worked in brass and iron on the West- 
ern Continent," 1 also made for Massachu- 
setts, at his iron-works, the dies with which 
the " pine-tree" shillings and other coins of 
the colony were stamped ; and for the city 
of Boston " an ingiue to carry water in case 
of fire," which last construction was years 
in advance of any use of fire-engines on the 
continent of Europe. 

Pig-irou began to be exported from the 
American colonies to England as early as 
1718, when a record is made of a small lot 
of three and one-half tons received from Vir- 
ginia and Maryland. By 1728, however, pig- 
iron had become a regular and important 
article of colonial export, and some years 
later the exportation of bar-iron also com- 
menced, and from this time both pig and 
bar iron continued to be annually exported 
from the North American colonies until aft- 
er the breaking out of the Revolution. 

From the official returns of the British 
Custom-house (which are still extant, and 
have been published) the exact amount of 
such exports received in England at differ- 
ent periods from 1728 to 1776 was as follows : 



Years. 


Pig-iron. 


Bar-Iron. 


1728 29 


Tons. 

1127 
2404 
2274 
3244 
2554 
5303 
2996 
316 


Tons. 

"ii 

196 

389 

1059 

2222 

916 

28 


1732-33 


1745 


1754 


1764 


1771 


1775 


1776 





In addition, there was also some pig and 
bar iron exported from the colonies during 
the same period to both Scotland and Ire- 
land, though probably in no very consider- 
able quantities. 

Contemporaneously with the manufac- 
tures above noticed there were also estab- 
lished throughout the provinces manufac- 
tures of leather, of bricks, pottery, and 
glass, of distilled and fermented liquors, of 
hardware in various forms, of candles, snuff, 
gunpowder, copperas, and a multitude of 
other articles, so that at the close of the 
first century of their existence there was 
hardly a branch of useful industry common 
in Europe which was not practiced with 
more or less of success in the British North 

1 Lewis's History of Lynn, 



156 



PROGRESS IN MANUFACTURE. 



American colonies. In fact, so successful 
had been the attempts of the colonists to 
manufacture that the jealousy of the moth- 
er country began to be awakened at a peri- 
od considerably anterior to that mentioned, 
for Sir Josiah Child, although a much more 
liberal and intelligent politician than many 
of his countrymen at that day, in a dis- 
course "on trade," published in 1670, de- 
scribes New England as having come to be 
the most prejudicial plantation of Great 
Britain, and gives for this opinion the sin- 
gular reason that they are a people " whose 
frugality, industry, and temperance, and the 
happiness of whose laws and institutions, 
promise to them a long life and a wonderful 
increase of people, riches, and power." 

TRUE CAUSE OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 

And here we come for the first time upon 
the true cause of the American Revolution, 
which is now well understood to have been 
not so much that the colonists were denied 
representation in the central government, 
or that they were unduly restrained in re- 
spect to any liberty of their persons, but 
rather that their rights to property were 
continually interfered with, that they were 
denied the privilege of freely buying and 
selling wherever and whenever they might 
see fit, and of following the occupations 
which seemed to them most remunerative. 
On the other hand, the acts of Great Britain, 
viewed in the light of the investigations and 
experiences of another century, are suscep- 
tible of a much less harsh interpretation 
than it has been the custom to put upon 
them. Thus England, during the whole of 
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 
and even later, held, in common with the 
rest of the civilized world, a most firm be- 
lief in the doctrine, which had come down 
from the Middle Ages, that no one nation or 
individual could get gain from commerce or 
trade except at the expense of some other 
nation or individual, and that therefore the 
surest way for a nation or individual to 
prosper and grow rich was to sell as much 
and buy as little as possible, and to endeav- 
or to obtain gold and silver in exchange for 
what they did sell in preference to any oth- 
er products. Stated in the abstract, and in 
this last third of the nineteenth century, 
these doctrines seem very strange and most 



absurd; and yet the United States is the 
one nation of all others claiming to be en- 
lightened which to-day by her commercial 
system fails to recognize or practically de- 
nies the great economic axiom that no na- 
tion or community can sell to any great ex- 
tent except in proportion as it is willing to 
buy ; that all trade and commerce must be 
mutually advantageous, or it would not ex- 
ist; and that after every fair mercantile 
transaction both parties, however varied 
their nationality and residences, are richer 
than before. 

It is also a mistake to suppose that the 
American colonies were planted with the 
least reference to the pecuniary or person- 
al benefit of the colonists themselves. The 
mode was simply this: The King of En- 
gland, on payment to himself of a certain 
sum, granted a tract of land of American 
territory, together with a charter, to a joint- 
stock company of English merchants and 
adventurers, who sent out a colony to cul- 
tivate the lands and gather their products 
for the pecuniary benefit of the stockhold- 
ers. It was clearly an enterprise for mak- 
ing money — as much so as are the railroad 
and other corporations of the present day — 
and the colonists were regarded as merely 
the hired servants of the company. This 
was the method after which all the colonies 
were established, and if the colonists pos- 
sessed any political privileges it was be- 
cause they wrenched them from the unwill- 
ing hands of the corporators. For proof of 
the correctness of this position reference is 
made to the pages of all the American his- 
torians, and to the still stronger testimony 
of the great Adam Smith, of Scotland, who, 
while the American Revolution was pro- 
gressing, declared that England had found- 
ed an empire on the other side of the At- 
lantic for the sole purpose of raising up a 
people of customers — a policy which he de- 
nounced as fit only for a nation of shop- 
keepers. 

Entertaining such views respecting the 
nature of trade and commerce and the use 
of colonies, nothing, therefore, was more 
natural and legitimate than that England 
should regard her transatlantic plantations 
as instrumentalities for the promotion of her 
own interests and aggrandizement exclu- 
sively, and that when the enterprise of the 



RESTRICTION ON COLONIAL INDUSTRY. 



157 



Americans in respect to certain branches of 
manufacturing industry seemed likely to be 
prejudicial to similar industries of her own, 
she should attempt to shackle and restrain 
their progress. It ought also to be borne in 
mind that if Great Britain acted unjustly 
toward the colonies, she was at least con- 
sistent in both her home and her colonial 
policy, and framed the former, equally with 
the latter, in strict accordance with the then 
narrow commercial spirit of the age. Thus, 
if it was forbidden to the colonists to export 
woolen goods, or transport wool from one 
"plantation" to another, there was at the 
same time on the statute-book of England a 
law which made it felony for any English- 
man to export any sheep from the kingdom, 
or to purchase or transport any wool within 
fifteen miles of the sea without permission 
of the king, or to load or carry any wool 
within five miles of the sea, except between 
sunrising and sunsetting. And again, if the 
colonists were not permitted to carry any 
article of produce on the seas except in 
British ships, the necessity was about the 
same time announced in Parliament by the 
Lord Chancellor of going to war with the 
Dutch, and of destroying their commerce, 
because " it was impairing ours." 

On the other hand, in respect to all those 
colonial industries which were not regarded 
as antagonistic to British interests, the ac- 
tion of Parliament was generous and consid- 
erate. For example, the cultivation of to- 
bacco was forbidden in England by highly 
penal enactments, for the sake of securing a 
monopoly of that product to the Southern 
colonies. Liberal premiums were also of- 
fered and awarded for the cultivation and 
exportation of colonial silk, indigo, hemp, 
flax, and for the promotion of the fisheries ; 
and in 1750 an act passed Parliament to 
encourage the exportation of pig and bar 
iron from his Majesty's plantations in Amer- 
ica, whereby all duties on the import of 
the same into Great Britain were removed, 
although maintained in respect to the im- 
ports from all other countries. Neverthe- 
less, the one most important fact in connec- 
tion with this topic is that it was the rapid 
growth of colonial commerce and manu- 
factures, conjointly with the attempt of 
Great Britain to interfere with and sup- 
press them, which led to a gradual and in- 



creasing alienation and final violent sepa- 
ration of the two countries. 

The first important act which operated as 
a restriction on the industry of the colonists 
was the so-called " Navigation Act" of 1650, 
which, although primarily intended, to use 
the words of Sir William Blackstone, "to 
mortify our sugar islands, which were disaf- 
fected to Parliament, and at the same time 
clip the wings of our opulent and aspiring 
neighbors," the Dutch, nevertheless struck 
a heavy blow at one of the foremost indus- 
tries of the colonies, namely, ship-building. 
By this act and its extensions in 1661 and 
1663 it was provided that no article of colo- 
nial produce or British manufacture should 
be carried in any but British ships, and that 
the colonists should not be allowed to pur- 
chase in any but British markets any manu- 
factured article which England had to sell. 
Following the enactment of these purely 
commercial restrictions, it soon also became 
a policy on the part of Great Britain to dis- 
courage all attempts at manufacturing by 
the colonists in competition with similar 
British industries ; and it was in pursuance 
of this policy that in 1696 the management 
of the affairs of the colonies was by royal 
order committed to a Board of Trade, under 
the title of " The Lords Commissioners for 
Trade and the Plantations." Henceforth 
the vigilant nation of shop-keepers would 
not be content with watching and control- 
ling the shipping and trade of American 
ports, but must lay its hands on all the man- 
ufacturing industries of the colonies. The 
royal governors were required to report 
yearly to the board on the state of the prov- 
inces, and to do all in their power to divert 
them from setting up and carrying on man- 
ufactures. But reports and recommenda- 
tions were not sufficient to repress the in- 
dustrial enterprise of the Americans, and 
three years after, the board having received 
complaint that the wool and woolen manu- 
factures of the North American plantations 
began to be exported to foreign markets 
formerly supplied by England, an act was 
passed by Parliament which, after declar- 
ing in its preamble " that colonial industry 
would inevitably sink the value of lands in 
England," prohibited thereafter the move- 
ment of any American wool or woolen man- 
ufactures not only to foreign countries, but 



158 



PROGRESS IN MANUFACTURE. 



also as between one colony and another. 
And in 1731, as complaint of the increasing 
divergence of trade from its prescribed chan- 
nels by the action of the colonists continued 
to be made by British merchants and manu- 
facturers, the House of Commons again took 
up the subject, and ordered, through the 
Board of Trade, an inquiry " with respect to 
laws made, manufactures set up, or trade 
carried on" (in the colonies) "detrimental 
to the trade, navigation, and manufacture of 
Great Britain." The report made in pursu- 
ance of this order in 1731-32 furnishes some 
curious particulars respecting the state of 
manufactures at that time iu America, al- 
though it was known to be so incomplete 
that the concealment practiced was made 
the subject of complaint in England. The 
return of one officer, for example, stated that 
it was extremely difficult to obtain any true 
information, and, furthermore, that the As- 
sembly of Massachusetts Bay had had the 
boldness to summon him to answer for hav- 
ing given any evidence whatever to the 
British House of Commons respecting the 
trade and manufactures of that province. 
The Governor of New Hampshire reported 
that there were no settled manufactures in 
that province. The Governors of Connecti- 
cut and the Carolinas made no returns, and 
the Governor of Rhode Island confined his 
report to matters not connected with man- 
ufactures. Massachusetts was reported as 
having manufactures of cloth, a paper mill, 
also several forges for making bar-iron, some 
furnaces for cast and hollow ware, one slit- 
ting-mill, and a manufacture of nails. The 
Surveyor -General of his Majesty's Woods 
wrote that they have in New England six 
furnaces and nineteen forges for making 
iron ; that many ships were built for the 
French and Spaniards ; and that great quan- 
tities of hats were made and exported to 
Spain, Portugal, and the West Indies. They 
also make all kinds of iron for shipping, and 
have several still-houses and sugar-hakeries. 
Immediately after the reception and pub- 
lication of this report, or in 1732, it was en- 
acted by Parliament that "no hats or felts 
should be exported from the colonies, or be 
laden upon any horse or carriage to the in- 
tent to be exported from thence to any oth- 
er plantation or to any other place whatev- 
er ;" limiting also the number of apprentices 



at the business, and forbidding any black 
or negro from making hats under any cir- 
cumstances. Nor was this all, for in 1750 
a bill was introduced into Parliament de- 
creeing that every slitting-mill in America 
should be demolished; and although this 
bill failed of passing the House of Commons 
by only twenty-two votes, a subsequent act 
did pass, that no new mills of that descrip- 
tion should be erected. 

It is most important and instructive to 
diverge for a moment at this point from 
tracing the development of American man- 
ufactures, and briefly notice the effect of 
the long-continued restrictive legislation of 
Great Britain on political and commercial 
morality. The multitude, of arbitrary laws 
enacted to force the industry and commerce 
of the colonies and the British people into 
artificial and unnatural channels created a 
multitude of new crimes ; and transactions 
which appeared necessary for the general 
welfare, and were no way repugnant to the 
moral sense of good men, were forbidden by 
law under heavy penalties. The colonists 
became thenceforth a nation of law-break- 
ers. Nine-tenths of the colonial merchants 
were smugglers. One-quarter of the whole 
number of the signers of the Declaration 
of Independence were bred to commerce, to 
the command of ships, and the contraband 
trade. John Hancock was the prince of 
contraband traders, and, with John Adams 
as his counsel, was on trial before the Ad- 
miralty Court in Boston at the exact hour 
of the shedding of blood at Lexington, to 
answer for half a million dollars' penalties 
alleged to have been by him incurred as a 
smuggler. And if good old Governor Jon- 
athan Trumbull, of Connecticut (Brother 
Jonathan), did not walk in the same ways 
as his brother patriot in Massachusetts, 
then tradition, if not record, has done him 
very great injustice. There is also on rec- 
ord a letter of Alexander Hamilton, written 
in 1771, at the time he was in mercantile 
business as a clerk in the West Indies, indi- 
cating an entire familiarity with a contra- 
band trade carried on by his employers with 
the Spanish colonies. But men like Hancock 
and Trumbull had been made to feel that 
government was their enemy; that it de- 
prived them of their natural rights; that 
in enacting laws to restrain them from la- 



AFTER THE REVOLUTION. 



159 



boring freely, and freely exchanging the 
fruits of their labors, it at the same time 
enacted the principle of slavery, and that 
therefore every evasion of such laws was a 
gain to liberty. 

Furthermore, the continuance of such a 
policy as was adopted by Great Britain to- 
ward the colonies, and the spirit of resist- 
ance which was as naturally evoked in turn 
on the part of the colonists, could tend to 
but one end, namely, war and revolution; 
and in 1775 war and revolution came. 

The population of the colonies at about 
the time (1670) that their progress in man- 
ufactures began to excite the jealousy of 
Great Britain was probably a little less than 
200,000. 

In 1714 the Board of Trade, for the pur- 
pose of aiding their judgment in respect to 
the condition of affairs in America, caused a 
census to be taken of the colonies, which re- 
turned a population of 434,000 ; and another 
in 1727, which gave an aggregate of 580,000. 
Mr. Bancroft estimates the total popula- 
tion of the colonies in 1750 to have been 
1,260,000 ; and in 1770, five years previous to 
the outbreak of the Revolution, at 2,312,000 ; 
of whom 1,850,000 were white and 462,000 
black. 

PROGRESS SINCE THE REVOLUTION. 
The immediate effect of the war of the 
Revolution, by cutting off all except casual 
and uncertain commercial intercourse with 
Europe and other countries, was to impart a 
fresh impulse to such manufactures in the 
colonies as were then established, and to 
call into existence some new ones. The 
immediate effect of the return of peace (in 
1783), on the contrary, was most disastrous 
to nearly all business interests, and more es- 
pecially to the mechanical and manufactur 
ing industries. But such a result could not 
well have been otherwise. The country had 
been subjected to a long and impoverishing 
war ; it was exhausted of men as well as of 
means ; labor was scarce and high, and the 
burden of debt, both public and private, was 
most onerous. It has been the custom of 
many writers in treating of this period to 
attribute the disastrous condition of affairs 1 
which was immediately incident to the close ! 
of the Revolution to an unrestrained influx . 
of foreign commodities; but that this agen- 



cy was not in a high degree potential for 
mischief is proved by the circumstance that 
the average imports of British manufactures 
into the couutry for several years previous 
to 1789, notwithstanding a great increase to 
the population of the States, was consider- 
ably less than the average of several years 
preceding the war ; and also that when the 
first tariff on imports came to be enacted 
under the Constitution, the rate establish- 
ed on all textile fabrics was only five per 
cent., and on all manufactures of metal but 
seven and a half per cent. But the manner 
in which importations were then made was 
undoubtedly most mischievous. There was 
no national government, and the division of 
the powers of government among thirteen 
petty sovereignties rendered the adoption 
of uniform laws impossible. Each State 
accordingly had its own tariff and regula- 
ted its own trade. What was binding in 
Massachusetts had no validity in Rhode Isl- 
and, and what was subject to duty in New 
York might be imported free into Connect- 
icut or New Jersey. Practically, therefore, 
no revenue could be collected on imports. 
Great Britain, also, seeing that as a nation 
we were commercially helpless, not only re- 
fused to negotiate a commercial treaty with 
us, but by an Order in Council excluded our 
ships from their ports in the West Indies, 
and, as the government of the States was 
then constituted, we had no power through 
retaliation to compel reciprocity. Yet, ac- 
cording to one who participated in the acts 
of the Revolution, and was one of the most 
sagacious observers and writers of the peri- 
od — Peletiah Webster, of Philadelphia — all 
the sufferings and evils which the country endured 
from all other agencies were insignificant in 
comparison with the misery that resulted 
from the introduction and use of an irre- 
deemable paper money, and the consequent 
irregularities of the entire American fiscal 
system, his exact language being as follows : 
" We have suffered more from this cause than 
from any other cause of calamity. It has 
killed more men, perverted and corrupted 
the choicest interests of our country more, 
and done more injustice, than even the arms 
and artifices of our enemies." And again 
he says, "If it saved the state, it has vio- 
lated the equity of our laws, corrupted the 
justice of our public administration, ener- 



160 



PROGRESS IN MANUFACTURE. 



rated the trade, industry, and manufactures 
of our country, and gone far to destroy the 
morality of our people." 

But let the causes have heen what they 
may, there is no douht that for a hrief pe- 
riod subsequent to the close of the war 
the industry of the country was greatly 
depressed. The establishment of a stable 
government, however, by the adoption of 
the Constitution at once gave to affairs a 
new aspect. The wretched system of dis- 
trust, jealousy, and weakness, which had 
before paralyzed all enterprise, and sunk 
the revenues and credit of the Confedera- 
tion to the lowest point, disappeared, and 
fresh energy was infused into all depart- 
ments of business. "American labor," says 
Dr. Bishop, " at this period began steadily 
to change its form from a general system 
of isolated and fireside manual operations — 
though these continued for some time lon- 
ger its chief characteristic — to the more or- 
ganized efforts of regular establishments, 
with associated capital and corporate priv- 
ileges, employing more or less of the new 
machinery which was then coming into use 
in Europe." 

The population of the country increased 
from an estimate of 2,945,000 in 1780 to 
3,924,000 in 1790 ; and it is curious to note 
that the percentage of decennial increase 
of thirty-three per cent, thus established in 
this decade maintained itself with approx- 
imative uniformity for each subsequent 
decade from 1790 to the breaking out of the 
rebellion in 1860. 

In an address before the "Pennsylvania 
Society for the Encouragement of Manufac- 
tures," August, 1787, by Mr. Tench Coxe (aft- 
erward Assistant-Secretary of the Treasury 
under Hamilton), the great progress in agri- 
culture and manufactures "since the late 
War" was particularly dwelt upon. In Con- 
necticut, at this time, according to this au- 
thority, the household manufactures were 
such as to furnish " a surplus sold out of the 
Staff. New England linen had affected the 
price and importations of that article from 
New York to Georgia." In Massachusetts 
the importation of foreign manufactures 
was less by one -half than it was twenty 
years before, although population had great- 
ly increased, and considerable quantities of 
home-made articles were shipped out of the 



State. In one regular factory of the latter 
'State there were made as much as 10,000 
pairs of cotton and wool cards, 100 tons of 
nails in another, and 150,000 pairs of stuff 
and silk shoes in the single town of Lynn. 
In the course of the address, pattern cards, 
embracing thirty-six specimens of silk lace 
and edgings from the town of Ipswich, 
Massachusetts, were exhibited. In Rhode 
Island the number of regular factories was 
stated to be " great in proportion to its pop- 
ulation." Mr. Coxe, however, greatly dep- 
recated the wasteful use of foreign manu- 
factures, and as an illustration stated that 
the importation into Philadelphia alone of 
the finer kinds of coat, vest, and sleeve but- 
tons, buckles, and other trinkets cost the 
wearers annually sixty thousand dollars. 
The sale of spinning-wheel irons from one 
shop in Philadelphia in 1790 amounted to 
1500 sets, an increase of twenty-nine per 
cent, over the sales of the previous year. 
In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, then the largest 
inland town in the United States, there were 
in 1786 about 700 families, of whom 234 were 
manufacturers, in which number were in- 
cluded 14 hatters, 36 shoe-makers, 25 tailors, 
25 weavers of cloth, and 4 dyers. Within 
ten miles of the town were four oil mills, five 
hemp mills, one fulling-mill. Frederick and 
Elizabeth, towns in Maryland, and Stanton 
and Winchester, Virginia, were also impor- 
tant centres of domestic industry, the last- 
named being famous for its manufacture of 
hats. There was also a manufactory of glass 
at Alexandria, Virginia, which, according to 
the French traveler, De Warville, exported 
in 1787 glass to the amount of 10,000 pounds, 
and employed 500 hands. In 1789 Mr. Cly- 
mer, of Pennsylvania, stated in Congress 
that there were fifty-three paper mills with- 
in range of the Philadelphia market, and 
that the annual product of the Pennsylva- 
nia mills was 70,000 reams, which was sold 
as cheap as it could be imported, and that, 
too, in the absence of any duty. The com- 
piler of the Bibliotheca Americana, published 
in London in 1789, states that the people 
of North America manufactured their own 
paper in sufficient quantities for home con- 
sumption ; and the report of Secretary 
Hamilton the following year also repre- 
sents the paper manufacture as one of the 
branches of American industry which had 



HAMILTON'S REPORT. 



161 



arrived at the greatest perfection, and was 
"most adequate to national supply." And 
yet De Warville a few years previous wrote 
that on account of the scarcity and dear- 
uess of labor and of rags, the Americans 
could not for many years to come furnish 
sufficient paper for the prodigious consump- 
tion caused by the increase of knowledge 
and the freedom of the press. 1 

An estimate made by Mr. Coxe in 1790 
fixed the annual value of the manufactures 
of the United States for that year at more 
than $20,000,000. It is also curious to note 
that he took as the basis of his computation 
the returns of the manufacturing industry 
of Virginia, which then included Kentucky. 
As Assistant-Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. 
Coxe also asserted, about this period, that 
the manufactures of the United States were 
certainly greater than double the value of 
their exports in native commodities, and 
much greater than the gross value of all 
their imports, including the value of all the 
goods exported again. 

In January, 1790, President Washington 
delivered his first annual message to Con- 
gress, and it is noted that he was dressed 
at the time in a full suit of broadcloth, 
manufactured at the woolen factory of Col- 
onel Jeremiah Wordsworth, at Hartford, 
Connecticut, " where all parts of the busi- 
ness are performed except spinning." In 
this message the subject of the promotion 
of manufactures was commended to the at- 
tention of Congress ; and acting upon the 
suggestions of the President, Congress there- 
upon ordered that the Secretary of the Treas- 
ury " prepare and report a proper plan or 
plans for the encouragement and promo- 
tion of manufactories as will tend to ren- 
der the United States independent of other 
nations for essential, particularly for mili 
tary, supplies ;" and in accordance with this 
order Mr. Hamilton in the following year 
(1791) submitted his famous report, twice 
printed by order of Congress, on American 
manufactures. 

In this report the Secretary, after discuss- 
ing at length the relations of agriculture 
and manufactures to each other and the 
state, the importance of manufacturing es- 
tablishments as agencies for augmenting the 



1 Bishop's History of American Manufactures. 
11 



produce and revenue of society, the then 
existing obstacles in the way of the exten- 
sion of American manufactures, the neces- 
sity of the adoption of a policy of encour- 
agement toward them by the state, and 
the unity of interest between the different 
sections of the country, presents in general 
terms an exhibit, classified under seventeen 
heads, of the manufacturing industries in 
the country, which had at that time made 
such progress as in a great measure to sup- 
ply the home market, and which were also 
carried on " as regular trades." Among 
these the Secretary enumerates manufac- 
tures of skins and leather, including under 
this head leather breeches and glue; flax 
and hemp, but not cotton ; iron, and most 
implements of iron and steel ; bricks and 
pottery ; starch and hair-powder ; manufac- 
tures of brass and copper, particularly spec- 
ifying utensils for brewers and distillers, 
andirons and philosophical apparatus ; tin- 
ware " for most purposes ;" carriages of all 
kinds ; " lamp-black and other painter's col- 
ors ;" refined sugars, oils, soaps, candles, hats, 
gunpowder, chocolate, silk shoes, and " wom- 
en's stuffs ;" snuff, chewing tobacco, etc., etc. 
" Besides these," he continues, " there is a 
vast scene of household manufacturing, 
which contributes more largely to the sup- 
ply of the community than could be imag- 
ined without having made it an object of 
particular inquiry." But as indicating how 
limited an idea of the actual and future re- 
sources of the country was even then pos- 
sessed by a mind so intelligent and com- 
prehensive as that of Alexander Hamilton, 
the following memoranda from this report 
are also exceedingly curious and pertinent. 
Thus, for example, under the head of coal, 
he notes "that there are several mines in 
Virginia now worked, and appearances of 
their existence are familiar in a number of 
places." " There is something," also says 
the Secretary, "in the texture of cotton 
which adapts it in a peculiar degree to the 
application of machines," and in a country 
in which a deficit of hands constitutes the 
greatest obstacle to success, this circum- 
stance particularly recommends its fabrica- 
tion. American cotton, he adds, can be pro- 
duced in abundance ; and " a hope may be 
reasonably indulged that with due care and 
attention" its quality will greatly improve. 



162 



PROGRESS IN MANUFACTURE. 



Under the head of " the means proper to 
be resorted to" by the government for the 
promotion of manufactures, the Secretary, 
after enumerating and discussing the va- 
rious agencies " which have been employed 
with success iu other countries," gave his 
recommendation in favor of a system of 
"pecuniary bounties," and offered in support 
of t lie same the following reasons : 

" 1. It is a species of encouragement more positive 
and direct than any other. 

" 2. It avoids the inconvenience of a temporary aug- 
mentation of price, which is incident to some other 
modes. 

" 3. Bounties have not, like high protecting duties, 
a tendency to produce scarcity. 

" 4. Bounties are sometimes not only the best but 
the only proper expedient for uniting the encourage- 
ment of a new object of agriculture with that of a new 
object of manufacture. The true way to conciliate 
these two interests is to lay a duty on foreign manu- 
factures of the material the growth of which is de- 
sired to be encouraged, and apply the produce of that 
duty, by way of bounty, either upon the production of 
the material itself, or upon its manufacture at home, 
or upon both. In this disposition of the theory the 
manufacturer commences his enterprise under every 
advantage which is attainable as to quantity and price 
of the raw material, and the farmer, if the bounty be 
immediately to him, is enabled by it to enter into a 
successful competition with the foreign material." 

He accordingly recommended the imposi- 
tion of additional duties on imports, the pro- 
ceeds of which, after satisfying the national 
pledges in respect to the public debt, he pro- 
posed should constitute a fund for paying 
the bounties which might be decreed, and 
for the operations of a board to be estab- 
lished for promoting arts, agriculture, man- 
ufactures, and commerce. The members of 
this board were to consist of certain officers 
of the government, and were to apply the 
funds derived from the sources indicated to 
assist the immigration of artists and man- 
ufacturers, to promote the discovery and 
introduction of useful inventions and im- 
provements, and "to encourage by premi- 
ums, both honorable and lucrative, the ex- 
ertions of individuals and of classes in 
relation to the several objects they are 
charged with promoting." The bounties 
thus recommended were not, however, in- 
tended by the Secretary to be permanent ; 
for, as he remarks, their " continuance on 
manufactures long established must always 
be of questionable policy, because presump^ 
tion would arise in every such case that^ 
/ t litre were natural and inherent impedi- ■ 
i incuts to success." j 



He also dwells at considerable length on 
a topic too often overlooked, namely, that it 
" is not merely necessary that the measures 
of government which have a direct view to 
manufactures should be calculated to assist 
and protect them, but also that those which 
collaterally affect them in the general course 
of administration should be guarded from 
any particular tendency to injure them;" 
and under this head especially asks atten- 
tion to " the unfriendly aspect of certain spe- 
cies of taxes toward manufactures." Among 
such he enumerates, first, all poll aud capi- 
tation taxes, which, if levied according to a 
fixed rule, operate unequally and injuriously 
on the industrious poor; "second, all taxes 
which proceed according to the amount of 
capital supposed to be employed in a busi- 
ness, or of profits supposed to be made on it, 
are unavoidably hurtful to industry : men 
engaged in any trade or business have com- 
monly weighty reasons to avoid disclosures 
which would expose with any thing like ac- 
curacy the real state of affairs, and allowing 
to the public officers the most equitable dis- 
positions, yet when they are to exercise a 
discretion without certain data they can 
not fail to be often misled by appearances ;" 
and finally, continues the Secretary, in words 
that deserve to be printed in gold on the 
walls of every legislative assembly, " arbi- 
trary taxes, under which denomination are 
comprised all those that leave the quantum . 
of the tax to be raised by each person to I 
the discretion of certain officers, are as con- . 
trary to the genius of liberty as to the max -J 
ims of industry." ' 

Although this celebrated report of Alex- 
ander Hamilton both at the time it was 
made and since has been regarded as a mod- 
el of clear and unanswerable reasoning, and 
was also unquestionably of great service to 
the country, yet it is well known that his 
specific recommendations of bounties in pref- 
erence to protective or prohibitory duties, 
and also for the repeal of all duties on im- 
ported cotton as a raw material of manu- 
factures, were not complied with ; but that, 
on the contrary, the system of protective 
duties on imports which then prevailed in 
Europe was gradually established in its 
place, and from that day to this has been 
continued. 

The period of the adoption of the Federal 



COTTON MANUFACTURE. 



161$ 



Constitution, in 1789, marks also the period 
of the commencement of the manufacture of 
cotton in the United States, as a regular 
and systematic in contradistinction to a do- 
mestic and irregular business. Cotton had 
indeed been grown for many years previous 
throughout the Southern sections of the 
country, but its use up to 1789-90 had been 
almost exclusively domestic, and even for 
this purpose the quantity produced was in- 
adequate to supply the home demand. In 
fact, so little suspicion was entertained of 
the particular adaptability of the soil and 
climate of the Southern States for the cul- 
ture of cotton, that when in 1784 an Ameri- 
can ship entered Liverpool with eight bags 
of the fibre as a part of her cargo, the same 
was regarded as an unlawful importation, 
on the assumption that so large a quantity 
could not have been the produce of the 
United States. And as late, furthermore, as 
1792 the cotton product of the United States 
was regarded as of so little value commer- 
cially that John Jay consented to the in- 
corporation of a provision (afterward re- 
jected by the Senate) in the treaty that he 
negotiated with Great Britain that "no 
cotton should be imported from the United 
States," the design on the part of Great Brit- 
ain being not to interfere with the cotton 
culture of the United States, but to secure 
for her own mercantile marine the exclu- 
sive movement of cotton from the West In- 
dies. Mr. Tench Coxe, in common with 
other members of the "Pennsylvania Soci- 
ety for Encouraging Manufactures," seems, 
however, to have early foreseen the future 
importance of cotton to both American ag- 
riculture and manufactures, and when the 
Convention for framing the Constitution 
assembled in Philadelphia his earnest rec- 
ommendations to the Southern delegates on 
the subject induced many of them, on their 
return home, to make personal efforts to 
interest their constituents in extending the 
cultivation of the fibre. 

The inventions of Hargreaves, Arkwright, 
Compton, and Cartwright for carding, spin- 
ning, and weaving cotton by machinery 
were introduced in England between the 
years 1768 and 1788 ; and although at first 
were so much opposed that the iuventors 
were afraid to work openly, and had in some 
instances their lives threatened and their 



machinery destroyed, yet Parliament very 
early appreciated the national importance 
of ^lejkeveral inventions, and in accordance 
wrUHpliarrow spirit of the age, enacted in 
1774, ;iM subsequently, most strict prohibi- 
tions of the export of any textile machinery 
from the kingdom. These statutes, which 
were vigilantly enforced by the British gov- 
ernment, together with a law against enti- 
cing artificers to emigrate, for a time proved 
most serious obstacles in the way of the in- 
troduction of the new English textile ma- 
chinery into the United States, although 
many most ingenious efforts to evade the 
law were made by oiu* countrymen. Mr. 
Tench Coxe, who omitted no opportunity to 
promote the cotton industry, at one time, 
for example, succeeded, after no little trou- 
ble and expense, in having secretly made in 
England models of a full set of Arkwright's 
machinery, but they were unluckily seized 
and confiscated as they were on the point of 
shipment. The information sought for was, 
however, gradually obtained, and in 1786 
Hugh Orr, of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, 
a pioneer in American manufactures, noti- 
fied the Legislative of Massachusetts that 
he had in his employ two Scotchmen, broth- 
ers, by the name of Barr, who had some 
knowledge of the new cotton machinery. 
Thereupon the Legislature appointed a com- 
mittee to examine the men and find out what 
they knew, which committee subsequently 
reported in favor of a grant of £200 to the 
Barrs to enable them to complete certain 
machines, and also as a gratuity for " their 
public spirit in making them known to the 
public." Six tickets in a State Land Lot- 
tery, which had no blanks, were accordingly 
voted to the Scotch brothers by the Legis- 
lature, and out of the proceeds the first 
" stock card" and " spinning-jenny" made in 
the United States were constructed. These 
machines were deposited by the order of the 
General Court with Mr. Orr, who was allow- 
ed to use them, as some compensation for his 
exertions in the matter, and was also re- 
quested to exhibit them and explain their 
principles " to any who might wish to be 
informed of their great use and advantage 
in carrying on the woolen and cotton man- 
ufacture." The subsequent year, 1787, a 
company to manufacture cotton was organ- 
ized at Beverly, Massachusetts, with one or 



164 



PROGKESS IN MANUFACTURE. 



more spinning-jennies, imported or made 
from the State's models, and a carding-ma- 
chine, imported at a cost of £1100; and 
about the same time also several other cot- 
ton manufactories were projected or start- 
ed — at Worcester, Massachusetts ; Provi- 
dence, Rhode Island; Paterson, New Jer- 
sey, and other places ; none of which, how- 
ever, for want of skill or proper machinery, 
appear to have been successful. 

Meanwhile (1789) there arrived in New 
York a young Englishman, not twenty-two 
years of age, whose name, Samuel Slater, 
was destined to become famous in the man- 
ufacturing annals of the United States. He 
had been apprenticed at an early age to 
Jedediah Strutt, a partner with Sir Richard 
Arkwright in the cotton-spinning business, 
and had afterward served the firm as clerk 
and general overseer, until he had rendered 
himself perfectly familiar with the manu- 
facture of cotton as it was then carried on 
in the model establishments of Great Brit- 
ain. The reason which has been assigned 
for his emigration to the United States was 
a notice in the newspapers of a grant of 
£100 by the Legislature of Pennsylvania 
for the introduction of a new machine for 
carding cotton, and of the establishment of 
a society for promoting the manufacture of 
cotton. But be this as it may, the 18th of 
January, 1790, found him at Providence, 
Rhode Island, entered into partnership with 
the firm of Almy and Brown, under an agree- 
ment to construct the Arkwright series of 
machines, and carry on with his partners 
the manufacture of cotton by the improved 
methods. In consequence of the restri ctions 
on the emigration of artisans and the ex- 
portation of models and machinery from 
Great Britain, Mr. Slater did not on leaving 
home inform his family of his destination, 
or take with him any patterns, drawings, or 
memoranda that could betray his occupa- 
tion, and so lead to his detention. But so 
thoroughly was he master of his profession 
that by the 20th of December of the same 
year, having discarded all the old machin- 
ery previously used by Almy and Brown in 
their attempts to manufacture cotton, he 
had constructed, chiefly with his own hands, 
the whole series of machines on the Ark- 
wright plan, and had started three cards, 
drawing and roving frames, and two frames 



of seventy-two spindles. The machinery 
was first set in motion in an old building 
which had been used as a clothier's estab- 
lishment ; but in 1793 the new firm built a 
small factory, which may be considered as 
the first really successful cotton mill in the 
United States. 

The only thing then wanting to insure 
the rapid development of the cotton manu- 
facture not only in the United States, but 
throughout Europe, was an abundant sup- 
ply of the fibre at a cheap rate ; and this 
the invention of the cotton-gin by Eli Whit- 
ney in 1793 at once supplied. For some 
years previous to this the price of cotton in 
the United States was about forty cents per 
pound, and it required oftentimes a day's 
labor to separate a pound of the clean staple 
from the seed. In 1795 Georgia cotton of 
good quality w T as offered in New York at 
Is. Gd. (thirty-six cents) per pound ; and at 
that time cotton continued also to be im- 
ported. When Slater first began to spin he 
used Cayenne cotton, but after a few years 
he began to mix about one-third of Southern 
cotton, the yarn produced being designated 
as second quality, and sold accordingly. 
The total cotton product of the world in 
1791 has been estimated at about 490,000,000 
pounds, or about a million bales, appor- 
tioned as follows : United States, 2,000,000 
pounds; Brazil, 22,000,000 pounds; West. 
Indies, 12,000,000 ; Africa, 46,000,000 ; India, 
130,000,000 ; the rest of Asia, 190,000,000 ; 
Mexico and South America, 68,000,000. Of 
the product of the United States at that 
time Georgia supplied about half a million 
pounds, and South Carolina a million and 
a half. In 1801 the product of the United 
States was estimated at 48,000,000 pounds ; 
and from that time the progress of the cul- 
ture of cotton is indicated by the following 
table : 



Yeare. 


Pounds. 


Years. 


Pounds. 


1801 

1811 

1821 

1S31-32... 


48,000,000 
80,000,000 
180,000,000 

:;.'.;.. ,000 


1839-40... 
1849-50. . . 
1859-60... 
1872-73... 


834,000,000 

958,000,000 

2,241,000,000 

l,v.'4, ,0110 



It will thus be seen that the largest crop 
of cotton ever grown in the United States 
was in the year 1859-60, just previous to 
the outbreak of the rebellion; yet it has 
been demonstrated by Mr. Atkinson that in 
that year the amount of land occupied by 
the growth of cotton was less than two per 



COTTON MANUFACTURE. 



165 



cent. (1.634) of the territory of the United 
States which is especially adapted to its 
cultivation. 

In 1799 Mr. Slater built his second cotton 
mill, on the east side of thePawtucket River, 
in the limits of Massachusetts, the first mill 
ever erected in the State on the Axkwright 
system ; and by act of the Legislature the 
same, with all its appurtenances, was for a 
period of seven years exempted from taxa- 
tion. Until this date the improved meth- 
ods of manufacture had been confined to 
Mr. Slater and his associates, but after this 
men who had been in their employ, and bad 
learned the construction and operation of 
the machinery, left them, and commenced 
the erection of mills for themselves or other 
parties, and before the year 1808 fifteen cot- 
ton mills on the Arkwright basis were in 
successful operation in different sections of 
the country. The first cotton mill west of 
Albany was erected in the neighborhood of 
Utica, Oneida County, New York, in 1807-8. 
In 1807 the whole number of spindles in the 
United States was estimated at 4000 ; in 1808 
the estimate was 8000 ; and in 1809, 31,000. 
From this time until 1840, apart from the 
annual estimates of the domestic consump- 
tion of cotton for all purposes, the statistics 
of the growth of the cotton manufacture in 
the United States are very deficient and uu- 
reliable. In 1815 the three States of Mas- 
sachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut 
had 165 factories and 119,510 spindles. In 
1831,795 factories and 1,246,500 spindles were 
reported for the whole country. In 1840, 
by the census, 2,285,000 spindles ; in 1850 
(for New England only), 2,728,000 spindles. 
After this the data are reliable, and are 
as follows: 1860, 5,035,798 spindles; 1870, 
7,114,000; 1874 (July 1), 9,415,383, of which 
8,927,754 were returned for the Northern 
Stales, and 487,629 for the Southern. The 
recent rapid progress of the Southern States 
in the manufacture of cotton is indicated 
by the fact that in 1869 this section of the 
country had 225,063 spindles in operation, 
and in 1874, 487,629. The progress of the 
whole country in spinning spindles from 
1870 to 1874 was about thirty-three per cent. 
The aggregate and average per capita man- 
ufacturing consumption of cotton in the 
United States since 1827 is shown by the 
following table : 



Years. Pounds. 


Consumption 
per Capita. 


1S27 


49,489,796 
79,597,896 

113,058,919 
161,435,000 
263,190,642 
306,582,808 
450,877,823 
145,935,000 
447,216,000 
5C7,5s:;,s7;{ 


4.22 
5.31 

6.68 
8.15 
11.34 
11.40 
14.32 
5.21 
11.57 
13.50 


1S35 


1840 


1845 


1850 


1855 


1S60 




1869 

1ST4 





In 1794 the price of Slater's cotton yarn, 
No. 20, was $1 21 per pound. In 1808 the 
price of the same number was $1 31. Power- 
loom weaving was first successfully intro- 
duced into Great Britain in 1806, previous 
to which time all weaving had been per- 
formed upon hand-looms. The first power- 
looms in the United States were put in op- 
eration at Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1814, 
and it was at the mills of the company at 
this place, also, that the spinning and weav- 
ing of cotton were for the first time com- 
bined in any large establishment. In this 
same year the price of cotton yarn was re- 
duced by the operations of the Waltham 
Company to less than one dollar per pound. 
In 1823 the "domestics" of the Waltham 
Company — which at about this time extend- 
ed its operations and built the first mill at 
Lowell — had become so popular that they 
were counterfeited by foreign manufactur- 
ers, and in 1827 it is recorded that the de- 
mand for American cottons in Brazil was 
considerably affected by imitations of them 
made at Manchester, England, and offered 
there (in Brazil) " at lower prices, although 
they could be made as cheaply in the United 
States as the same quality could be produced 
in Manchester." It is also a noteworthy 
circumstance that in 1850 in New England 
the ratio of cotton spindles to population 
was that of 1008 spindles to each 1000 in- 
habitants, while in Great Britain for the 
same year the ratio was 1003 spindles to 
1000 inhabitants, so that at this period New 
England in respect to cotton had compara- 
tively exceeded Great Britain in its manu- 
facturing industry. From 1850 to 1860 and 
from 1860 to 1870 the number of spindles in 
New England increased much faster than 
the population, averaging in 1860 1265 and 
in 1870 1478 to each 1000 inhabitants. 

The most important cotton manufactur- 
ing States of the Union, arranged in the 
order of their consumption of cotton for the 
year 1874, were as follows : Massachusetts, 



166 



PROGRESS IN MANUFACTURE. 



New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, 
Pennsylvania, Maine, New York, Maryland, 
Georgia, New Jersey, South Carolina, North 
Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, and Virginia. 
Few or no cotton factories exist in the States 
of Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kan- 
sas, Nebraska, California, or Oregon. The 
following table exhibits the amount and 
character of the principal products of the 
cotton manufactories of the United States 
for 1874 : 



such as lumber, sugar, ashes, wine, bricks, 
indigo, hemp, and the products of the fisher- 
ies, was at least $172,000,000, or including 
products of the nature specified, $198,000,000. 
In 1810, also, Mr. Gallatin, then Secretary of 
the Treasury,. reported to the House of Rep- 
resentatives that the following manufac- 
tures were carried on to an extent which 
might be considered adequate to the re- 
quirements of the United States for con- 
sumption, as the value of these products 



Statement of the Kinds and Quantities of Cotton Goods manufaotueed in the "United States fob 

the Yeab ending July 1, 1874. 



Threads, yarns, and twines lbs. 

Sheetings, shirtings, and similar plain 

goods yds. 

Twilled and fancy goods, osnaburgs, jeans, 

etc yds. 

Print cloths yds. 

Ginghams yds. 

Ducks yds. 

Bags 



32,000,000 

520,000,000 

204,000,000 

481,000,000 

30,000,000 

14,000,000 

5,000,000 



99,000,000 131,000,000 



90,000,000 

80,000,000 

107,000,000 

3,000,000 

16,000,000 

1,000,000 



610,000,000 

284,000,000 

5S8,000,000 

33,000,000 

30,000,000 

6,000,000 



18,000,000 
97,000,000 
22,000,000 



149,000,000 

707,000,000 

306,000,000 

588,000,000 

33,000,000 

30,000,000 

6,000,000 



Besides the above, there is a large produc- 
tion of articles, like hosiery, etc., composed 
of mixed cotton and wool, for the details 
of which there are no satisfactory statistics. 
Among other notable improvements which 
were Invented and brought into use about 
the time of the adoption of the Federal 
Constitution were those of Oliver Evans, of 
Pennsylvania, in respect to the manufacture 
of flour, the importance of which may per- 
haps be sufficiently indicated by saying that 
in all the subsequent progress of invention 
no radical change has ever been made in 
the system of "milling" machinery as Mr. 
Evans devised it, and that it constitutes to- 
day the mechanical basis upon which all the 
extensive flour mills of the United States 
and Europe are operated. The more spe- 
cial results of the invention were a saving 
of one-half the labor of attendance, a better 
product of manufacture, and an increase of 
about twenty-eight pounds of flour to each 
barrel above the method previously in use. 
As has been already stated, the value of 
the product of American manufactures for 
the year 1790, as estimated by Mr. Tench 
Coxe, was about $20,000,000. 

The census of 1810 fixed the total value 
of the manufactured products of the coun- 
try for that year at $127,000,000, but Mr. 
'Coxe, to whom the returns were referred by 
resolution of Congress for revision, was of 
the opinion that the aggregate, exclusive 
' of all products closely allied to agriculture, 



annually exported exceeded that of the for- 
eign articles of the same general class an- 
nually imported, viz., manufactures of wood, 
leather and manufactures of leather, soap 
and tallow-candles, spermaceti oil and can- 
dles, flaxseed oil, refined sugar, coarse earth- 
enware, snuff, hair -powder, chocolate, and 
mustard. The following branches were also 
reported as so firmly established as to supply 
in several instances the greater and in all 
a considerable pai't of the consumption of 
the country, viz., iron and manufactures of 
iron, manufactures of cotton, wool, and flax, 
hats, paper, printing types, printed books, 
and playing-cards, spirituous and malt liq- 
uors, gunpowder, window glass, jewelry and 
clocks, several manufactures of hemp and 
of lead, straw bonnets and hats, and wax- 
candles. 1 

Accepting the estimates of Mr. Coxe, it 
also appears that the annual value of the 
manufactured products of the 8,500,000 pop- 
ulation of the United States in 1810, less 
than thirty years after the close of the Rev- 
olution, was in excess of that of Great Brit- 
ain, with her accumulated capital and ex- 
perience, in 1787, when the population of 
the United Kingdom closely approximated 
to the same figure. 

The immediate effect of the war of 1812, 
by increasing demand for all necessary prod- 
ucts, and at the same time cutting off all 

1 Bishop's History of American Manufactures. 



AFTEE THE WAR OF 1812. 



107 



foreign imports and competition, was to im- 
part a most unnatural and unhealthy stim- 
ulus to American manufacturing industry. 
Capital, especially under the form of joint- 
stock companies, and often without the ex- 
ercise of the most ordinary prudence or fore- 
thought, hastened to inaugurate a host of 
new industrial enterprises. Mill privileges 
readily commanded most extravagant fig- 
ures, wages rose from 30 to 50 per cent., and 
raw materials and manufactured goods from 
50 to 200 per cent. Cottons which had sold 
before the war at from 17 to 25 cents per 
yard, found purchasers by the package at 
75 cents per yard ; and salt, which was, in 
1812, 55 cents per bushel, commanded iu Oc- 
tober, 1814, $3 per bushel. The number of 
cotton mills in Rhode Island and in Massa- 
chusetts within thirty miles of Providence, 
at the commencement of the war in 1812, 
was about seventy ; at the close of the 
war, in 1815, this number had increased to 
ninety-six. 

So long as the war continued there was 
for nearly all these enterprises an apparent 
great prosperity, to magnify and inflate 
which an almost unlimited issue of paper 
money also powerfully contributed. All the 
banks in the country, save those in New En- 
gland, suspended specie payments in 1814 ; 
and the Federal government, finding itself 
short of revenue, early in the course of the 
war commenced the issue of Treasury paper. 
But as specie disappeared and redemption 
was abrogated, not only public and pri- 
vate banking associations, but manufac- 
turing and bridge - building associations, 
and even individuals, issued paper notes, 
which rapidly passed into circulation, and 
were largely taken by the public. Iu one 
session, that of 1813 - 14, the Legislature 
of Pennsylvania chartered forty-one new 
banks, with $17,000,000 of capital ; and ac- 
cording to one writer of the time, "the 
plenty of money was so profuse that the 
managers of the banks were fearful that 
they could not find a demand for all they 
could fabricate, and it was no infrequent 
occurrence to hear solicitations urged to in- 
dividuals to become borrowers, under prom- 
ises of indulgences the most tempting." 
The result was that the money of the coun- 
try in a great degree lost its value, and its 
depreciation, enhancing the prices of every 



species of property and commodity, appear- 
ed like a real rise in value, and induced all 
manner of speculations and extravagance. 
The editor of Niles's Register characterized 
"the prodigality and waste as almost be- 
yond belief," and speaks of the furniture of 
a single private parlor in one of the Eastern 
cities as costing upward of $40,000. On the 
other hand, Mr. Mathew Carey, of Phila- 
delphia, writing in 1816, called this period 
" the goldeu age of Philadelphia," and says, 
" The rapid circulation of property, the im- 
mensity of business done, and the profits 
made on that business produced a degree 
of prosperity which she had perhaps never 
before witnessed." And in another portion 
of the pamphlet from which the above lan- 
guage is quoted he further declared " that 
never was the country in a more enviable 
state." 

With the return of peace, and the conse- 
quent cessation of demand for commodities 
on the part of the government, the fall of 
prices, and the resumption of importations, 
all this bubble of prosperity, however, col- 
lapsed with great rapidity, and the country 
entered upon a period of prostration and 
stagnation of all industrial effort which has 
had no parallel iu all its history except 
possibly during the darkest hours of the 
Revolution. Expecting large demands aud 
high prices for commodities, English and 
American merchants imported enormously 
as soon as practicable after the ports had 
been opened ; but the markets becomiug 
soon overstocked, prices, under forced sales, 
declined to such an extent as to prove ruin- 
ous uot only to the importers, but also to a 
large proportion of the injudicious or high- 
cost manufacturing establishments whicb 
the war had stimulated into existence. To 
remedy this state of things, Congress in 1816 
enacted the first strong protective tariff", al- 
though the average rate of duty imposed 
by it on all imports was only about twenty- 
five per cent., and on only a few articles 
was in excess of thirty per cent. It is in- 
teresting also to note that this measure was 
proposed and mainly supported by South- 
ern members of Congress — especially on the 
ground of encouraging the manufacture of 
our own cotton — and met with decided op- 
position from the people and Representa- 
tives of the North, whose capital and labor 



168 



PROGRESS IN MANUFACTURE. 



were at that time largely interested in com- 
merce and navigation. 

But whatever may have heen the ulti- 
mate effect of this tariff, its immediate ben- 
eficial influence in restoring prosperity to 
the manufacturing and other interests of 
the country proved far less than what was 
anticipated. On the contrary, the stagna- 
I ion of every kind of trade and industry, in- 
stead of diminishing, continued to increase, 
and did not reach its maximum until four 
years after the war, or in 1819. Specie pay- 
ments were resumed in 1817; and as a legit- 
imate consequence no small proportion of 
the paper promises to pay, which had been 
so recklessly issued and so profusely circula- 
ted as money, without security behind them 
for their payment, rapidly became worthless 
in the hands of the holders. The United 
States Bank, which at that time was the 
great financial regulator of the exchanges of 
the country, became also involved, through 
imprudent or dishonest management — los- 
ing through its Baltimore branch alone 
$1,671,000 — and in attempting to save it- 
self wrought such new mischief that the 
previous financial and industrial disasters 
of the country became almost insignificant 
in comparison. Rents and values of all real 
estate and merchandise were enormously 
depreciated. The population of Philadel- 
phia decreased 10,000 between 1815 and 
1820. At Pittsburg flour was one dollar per 
barrel, boards twenty cents per hundred, 
and sheep one dollar per head. Farms were 
mortgaged and sold every where for one- 
half to one-third of their value. Factories 
and workshops were every where closed; 
and in August, 1819, it was estimated by 
some authorities that as many as 260,000 
persons, formerly dependent on manufac- 
tures, were absolutely without means of 
support. 

After 1819, although the depression of 
prices continued through 1820, affairs began 
to improve. In this latter year the site for 
the city of Lowell was purchased, and be- 
tween 182] and 1827 it. is noted that thirty 
new col ton factories were erected in the 
State of New York alone. But from the 
epoch of the great financial and industrial 
revulsion following the war of 1812 down to 
the year L850 there are no reliable data for 
exhibiting by decades, or for shorter peri- 



ods, the aggregate progress and results of 
American manufacturing industry. Some 
specific details of interest may, however, be 
mentioned. 

Thus, in 1821 the value of the manufac- 
tured products of the United States exported 
was equal to 28 cents per head of the entire 
population. In 1825 this value had risen to 
51 cents, from which it declined in 1830 to 
41 cents. In 1835 it was again 51 cents ; in 
1840, 58 cents ; in 1845, 53 cents ; in 1850, 60 
cents ; and in the period from 1851 to 1861 
it attained the highest figures iu our in- 
dustrial history, namely, $1 40 in 1854 and 
$1 53 in 1860. Since the outbreak of the 
war, however, this representative value of 
exports of manufactures has not in any one 
year risen as high as $1 per capita for our en- 
tire population. 

In 1820 the total value of the books pub- 
lished in the United States was estimated at 
$2,500,000, and the relative proportion of 
British and American books consumed was 
estimated by S. C. Goodrich (Peter Parley) 
at seventy per cent, of the former to thirty of 
the latter ; but before 1850 the proportion of 
foreign books to American consumed in the 
country had become very inconsiderable. 

The mechanical inventions by which the 
cost of the manufacture of paper was great- 
ly reduced, through the substitution of ma- 
chinery producing a continuous sheet, in 
place of the old hand process by which sin- 
gle sheets were made successively and slow- 
ly, had their inception unquestionably in 
Europe at about the commencement of the 
present century, but the credit of so simpli- 
fying and enlarging the machinery as to 
make it practical and thoroughly efficient 
undoubtedly belongs to American paper- 
makers, John Ames, of Springfield, having 
been especially noted for his useful inven- 
tions. In 1800, "by the baud process, it 
took three months to complete the paper, 
ready for delivery, from the time of receiv- 
ing the rags into the mill." 1 At the present 
day twenty-four hours are amply sufficient. 
In 1820 the annual value of the product of 
the paper manufacturing industry of the 
United States was estimated at $3,000,000; 
in 1829, $7,000,000 ; in 1844, $16,000,000, by 
600 mills ; in 1854, $27,000,000, by 750 mills ; 

1 Munsell's Chronology of Paper and Paper-Making. 



IRON INDUSTRY. 



169 



in 1860, $39,428,000; and in 1870 (exclusive 
of paper-hangings), $48,675,000. 

The iron industry of the United States 
divides itself into two periods, one dating 
from the first settlement of the country to 
the end of the year 1862 ; the other extend- 
ing from 1863 to the end of 1873. The first 
period was one of gradual hut continuous 
growth ; the second was that in which the 
iron industry was stimulated into an extraor- 
dinary growth and activity, first by the war, 
and then by railroad building on the most 
extensive scale. 

The fact that both pig and bar iron were 
included among the regular exports of the 
country for many years prior to the Revolu- 
tion has been already noticed. After the 
war the progress of this industry was for a 
time very rapid, and in 1791 Mr. Hamilton 
in his report says, "Iron-works have great- 
ly increased in the United States, and are 
prosecuted with much more advantage than 
formerly." We find it also recorded at 
about this time that " a dangerous rivalry 
to British iron interests was apprehended 
in the American States, not only in the pro- 
duction of rough iron, from the cheapness 
of fuel and the quality of the iron, but also 
in articles of steel cutlery aud other finished 
products, from the dexterity of the Ameri- 
cans in the manufacture of scythes, axes, 
nails, etc." In 1810 Mr. Gallatin, Secretary 
of the Treasury, in a report on manufac- 
tures, classed that of iron as firmly estab- 
lished, and estimated the quantity of bar- 
iron produced to be 40,000 tons, against 
about 9000 imported. According to the 
census of 1810, there were 153 furnaces in the 
United States, producing 53,908 tons of iron, 
and four steel furnaces, producing 917 tons 
of steel, the importation of steel for the 
same year being reported at only 550 tons. 
The commercial and financial revulsions 
which followed the war of 1812-15 affected 
disastrously the iron manufacture in com- 
mon with all other industries ; but that it 
did not entirely interrupt it is shown by the 
fact that some new establishments of great 
importance went into operation at the time 
of the greatest depression ; and in 1816 the 
total import of pig-iron was but 329 tons. 
By 1824 the iron production and manufac- 
ture were both very active, and the pig-iron 
product of this year undoubtedly exceeded 



100,000 tons. For 1832 it was reported at 
200,000 tons. The first furnace for smelting 
with anthracite coal was built in 1837, but 
at the close of 1843 there were twenty an- 
thracite furnaces in successful operation. 
The first important demand for iron in the 
United States for railroad purposes com- 
menced in 1835, during which year 465 miles 
of road were constructed, followed by 416 iu 
1838, 516 in 1840, and 717 in 1841. In regard 
to the production of pig-iron in the United 
States during the decade from 1840 to 1850, 
a period characterized by extreme variations 
in the tariff" policy of the government, there 
has been no little of controversy ; but the 
most careful investigation yet made into 
the subject (that of Hon. W. M. Grosvenor) 
leads to the conclusion that the product 
of 1840 was about 347,000 tons, and that it 
increased from that figure to an aggregate 
of not more than 551,000 tons in 1846, and 
570,000 in 1848. Subsequent to this date 
the progress of the pig-iron industry may be 
accurately indicated as follows : 1850, 564,755 
tons; 1855, 784,178; 1860, 919,770; 1865, 
931,582 ; 1870, 1,865,000 ; 1873, 2,695,000. 

In 1865 the production of cast steel in 
the United States was 15,262 tons ; in 1873, 
28,000 tons. 

In 1868 the production of pneumatic or 
Bessemer steel was 8500 tons; in 1873 (esti- 
mated), 140,000 tons. The recent progress 
of that department of the iron industry cf 
the United States engaged in the manufac- 
ture of rails for railroads is also indicated 
by the following statistics of annual prod- 
uct : 1849, 24 ; 314 tons ; 1855, 138,674 ; 1860, 
205,038; 1865, 356,292; 1870, 620,000; 1872, 
941,000 ; 1873, 850,000. 

In 1840 the consumption of iron in the 
United States for all purposes was estima- 
ted at about 40 pounds per capita ; in 1846, 
at about 60 pounds ; in 1856, at 64 ; and iu 
1867, at (approximately) 100 pounds. The 
per capita consumption of Great Britain 
and Belgium alike for this latter year 
was 189 pounds ; and of France, 69-i pounds. 
For the years 1872-73 the per capita con- 
sumption of iron in the United States has 
been estimated as high as 150 pounds ; and 
that of Great Britain, at 200 pounds. 

It is more difficult to present the details 
of the growth and development of the wool- 
en manufacture of the United States than 



170 



PROGRESS IN MANUFACTURE. 



those of almost any other great domestic in- 
dustry ; and this, in a great degree, for the 
reason that no other industry has been sub- 
jected to such violent and radical disturb- 
ances by reason of financial and commercial 
revulsions, and by the frequent changes in 
the fiscal policy of the government in re- 
spect to the tariff. Previous to the Revo- 
lution this branch of manufacturing was so 
successfully established that its progress 
was regarded with probably more of jeal- 
ousy and apprehension by Great Britain 
than that of any other colonial industry, 
and most stringent efforts were made by 
Parliament to check or suppress it. After 
the war the business generally changed its 
"home" or "domestic" character, and be- 
came more and more of a " factory" enter- 
prise, and developed rapidly, down to the 
period of the " embargo" of 1808. Before 
the " embargo" American woolens were 
made for $1 06 per yard, equal in fineness 
and quality with British goods of double 
the width, costing $3 50 per yard. 

The immediate effect of the embargo and 
of the subsequent war was to greatly stim- 
idate the manufacture of woolens ; but wool 
was so high and scarce as to command in 
1815 $4 per pound, while broadcloths were 
as high as $18 per yard. The detailed ac- 
counts of one factory established at Goshen, 
Connecticut, in 1813, which have been pre- 
served, show that the proprietors purchased 
wool at $1 50 per pound, and sold cloth of a 
quality which at the present time would 
not command over $1 per yard, for $10 ; 
and, further, that the ultimate end of that 
factory after the war was an entire loss of 
the original capital, and three times as much 
more in addition. 

In the prostration of all business interests 
that followed the war the woolen industry 
participated, but yet not more largely than 
did that of cotton ; and it recovered so vig- 
orously that the capital invested in it was 
reported to Congress to have more than 
doubled between 1815-16 and 1827. From 
t his time, although the woolen manufacture 
has continued to increase, and at the pres- 
ent time has attained to a large develop- 



ment in almost every department, its record 
on the whole has been one of disaster rath- 
er than of success ; and the annals of Con- 
gress from 1827 onward are filled with ap- 
plications by representatives of the woolen 
interests for legislative relief, and with most 
pitiful statements of lack of profit, loss of 
capital, and abandonment of business. The 
explanation of this curious result in great 
part is that no one country produces all the 
different kinds of wool, which in variety of 
character may be said to range from the 
coarsest hair to the finest and most glossy 
eilk; and that in order that the manufac- 
ture of woolens may be conducted successful- 
ly, it is absolutely essential that the manu- 
facturer should be allowed to freely select 
his raw material from the peculiar products 
of every climate and soil, and at juices com- 
mon to all competitors. But such a condi- 
tion of things, through legislative interfer- 
ence, has not been given to American wool- 
en manufacturers in one single year since 
1827 ; added to which there has been no sta- 
bility in the duties imposed on imported 
fabrics of wool, the tariff on the single ar- 
ticle of blankets, for example, having been 
subjected to five radical and sudden changes 
during the period from 1857 to 1867 inclu- 
sive. The extreme and rapid variations in 
the price of American wool (upon Avhich the 
American manufacturer has been obliged to 
mainly rely) since the year 1827 also strik- 
ingly illustrate how unstable have been 
what may be regarded as the fundamental 
elements of the business. Thus the average 
price per pound of common " fleece" in New 
York for the year 1825 was 33 cents ; in 
1830, 22 cents ; in 1835, 33f cents ; in 1839, 38 
cents ; in 1842, 19 cents ; in 1850, 35 cents ; 
in 1853, 41 cents ; in 1858, 30 cents ; in 1863, 
67 cents ; and in 1873, 40 to 90 cents. 

By the census of 1840 the capital invest- 
ed in the manufacture of woolens in the 
United States was returned as in excess of 
$15,000,000, employing 21,000 persons, ami 
producing goods to the value of $20,696,000. 
Since 1850 the progress and condition of 
this industry as returned by the census are 
shown by the following table: 



Number of establishments 

Hands employed 

Capital invested 

Value of product 



1,559 
39,252 

$.28,118,000 
$43,207,000 



1,260 

41,360 

$30,862,000 

$61,894,000 



2,891 

93,108 

$108,998,000 

$177,963,000 



AGGREGATE ANNUAL PRODUCTION. 



171 



In 1850 the Federal government for the 
first time attempted to ascertain through 
the machinery of the census with any ap- 
proach to accuracy the exact condition and 
annual product of all the various industries 
of the country, not, however, including any 
establishment the value of whose annual 
product was not in excess of $500. The 
amount of capital at that time invested in 
manufactures in the whole country was re- 
turned at $553,123,822, and the value of the 
annual product (including fisheries and the 
products of the mines) at $1,019,106,616. 

By the census of 1860 the aggregate capi- 
tal employed in manufacturing for the whole 
country was returned at $1,009,855,715, and 
the gross value of the total annual product 
at $1,885,861,676, an increase as compared 
with the aggregate of 1850 of about eighty- 
eight per cent. By the census of 1870 the 
aggregate manufacturing capital returned 
was $2,118,208,000, and the gross value of 
the total annual product of manufactures 
$4,232,325,442. Reducing the census state- 
ments of these values of the annual product 
to equal terms respectively, the increase in 
the reported values of the products of man- 
ufacturing industry for the decade from 1860 
to 1870 was one hundred and eight per cent. 
But of this increase fifty-six per cent, was 
computed to represent merely the enhance- 
ment of prices in 1870 over those of 1860 by 
reason of the inflation of the currency and 
other general causes, leaving fifty-two per 
cent, as the actual increase in the value of 
production. Of this latter increase it was 
further estimated that about twenty-eight 
per cent, was due to increase during the 
decade in the amount of labor employed, 
and twenty-four per cent, to the applica- 
tion of steam or water power, the intro- 
duction of machinery, and the perfecting of 
processes. 

But the evidence is unquestionable that 
the returns of both the census of 1860 and 
that of 1870 in respect to the aggregate 
value of the annual product of our manu- 
facturing industries were much less than 
the actual facts warranted, and that if prop- 
er account had been taken of the omissions 
and deficiencies in the estimates of the pe- 
riods above given, the true value of the an- 
nual manufacturing product for 1860 would 
have been about $2,325,000,000 in place of 



$1,885,000,000, and for 1870 $4,839,000,000 in 
place of $4,232,000,000. 

Careful investigation has also shown that 
the data upon which the amount of capital 
invested in manufactures in the United 
States has from time to time been estimated 
under the census have been too unreliable 
and imperfect to authorize any but the most 
general conclusions; and furthermore that 
the results of any inquiry by Federal or 
State officials looking to the obtaining of 
accurate information respecting invested 
capital must, from the almost universal un- 
willingness of persons interested to give in- 
formation, be ever most unsatisfactory, if 
not wholly worthless. Thus the estimate 
under this head, based on the official returns 
of the census for 1870, was, as before shown, 
$2,118,000,000 ; but this sum, in the opinion 
of the Superintendent of the Census, Hon. 
F. A. Walker, did not in fact truly repre- 
sent more than one -fourth of the capital 
which actually contributed to make up the 
gross annual value of the manufactured 
product returned for the year 1870. 

RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF THE MANUFACTUR- 
ING INDUSTRIES OF THE UNITED STATES. 

The following detailed statements, com- 
piled from the returns of the census of 1870, 
indicate the relative importance of the great 
manufacturing industries of the country : 

Leather (including the dressing and tan- 
ning of skins, the manufacture of boots and 
shoes, saddlery, harnesses, belting, hose, 
pocket - books, trunks, bags, and valises, 
but excluding all other manufactures). — 
Hands employed, 202,613 ; capital invested, 
$133,902,000; value of annual product, exclu- 
sive of value of material used, $162,872,000. 

Lumber (planed and sawed). — Hands em- 
ployed, 163,511 ; capital invested, $161,406,- 
000 ; value of annual product, exclusive of 
value of material used, $120,201,000. 

Flouring and Crist Mill Products. — Hands 
employed, 58,448 ; capital invested, $151,565,- 
000 ; value of annual product, exclusive of 
value of material used, $77,593,000. 

Pig and Bar Iron Manufacture (including 
pigs, blooms, and iron forged and rolled). — 
Hands employed, 78,347 ; capital invested, 
$119,860,000 ; value of annual product, ex- 
clusive of value of raw material used, 
$70,272,000. 

Clothing (ready-made). — Hands employed. 



172 



PROGRESS IN MANUFACTURE. 



118,824; capital invested, $52,743,000; value 
of annual product, exclusive of value of ma- 
terial used, $69,600,000. 

Manufactures of Cotton (including batting 
and wadding, thread, twine, and yarns). — 
Hands employed, 136,763 ; capital invested, 
$140,900,000 ; value of annual product, ex- 
clusive of value of raw material used, 
$64,828,000. 

Manufactures of Wool (including woolen 
and worsted goods, wool carding, and cloth 
dressing). — Hands employed, 93,108 ; capital 
invested, $108,998,000 ; value of annual prod- 
uct, exclusive of value of material used, 
$66,745,000. 

Machinery. — Hands employed, 83,514 ; cap- 
ital invested, $101,181,000 ; value of annual 
product, exclusive of value of material used, 
$57,597,000. 

Carriages and Wagons (including building 
and repairing of railroad cars, children's 
wagons, and sleds). — Hands employed, 
71,772 ; capital invested, $53,941,000 ; value 
of annual product, exclusive of value of 
material used, $56,565,000. 

Agricultural Implements. — Hands employ- 
ed, 25,279 ; capital invested, $34,834,000 ; val- 
ue of annual product, exclusive of value of 
material used, $30,593,000. 

Paper (exclusive of paper-hangings). — 
Hands employed, 17,910 ; capital invested, 
$39,362,000 ; value of annual product, exclu- 
sive of value of material used, $18,648,000. 

Stoves, Heaters, and Hollow Ware. — Hands 
employed, 13,325; capital invested, $19,833,- 
000 ; value of annual product, exclusive of 
value of material used, $14,345,000. 

Hats and Caps. — Hands employed, 16,173; 
capital invested, $6,409,000 ; value of annual 
product, exclusive of value of material used, 
$12,587,000. 

Silk (including sewing and twist). — Hands 
employed, 6699 ; capital invested, $6,242,000 ; 
value of annual product, exclusive of value 
of material used, $4,415,000. 

It thus appears that the preparation and 
manufacture of leather ranks first in impor- 
tance of the various manufacturing indus- 
tries of the United States, and that the in- 
dustries represented by the planing and 
sawing of lumber, and by the "milling" of 
cereals, take precedence over the primary 
manufactures of iron and over the great 
textile industries of cotton and of wool. 



NUMBER OF PERSONS EMPLOYED. 
By the census of 1870, 11,155,240 persons, 
twenty years of age and upward, were re- 
turned according to occupations. Of this 
number 2,500,189 were engaged in manufac- 
tures and mining, being a gain of twenty-eight 
per cent, since 1860, or five and one-half per 
cent, more than the ratio of decennial in- 
crease in population. The number em- 
ployed in agriculture was at the same time 
returned at 5,151,767, and in trade and trans- 
portation at 1,117,928. 

SOCIAL CONDITION OF LABORERS. 

The data and material for describing the 
condition of laborers engaged in the manu- 
facturing industries of the United States at 
different periods are very meagre. During 
the colonial period and the early days of 
the republic there was but little accumula- 
ted national wealth, but what there was was 
probably distributed with more of equality 
than has ever prevailed in any other large 
community of which we have a correct his- 
tory for any lengthened period. At the 
commencement of the present century there 
were probably a smaller number of individ- 
uals in the country, in proportion to the 
whole population, who possessed an accu- 
mulated capital of $5000 than there are at 
the present time who possess $100,000. But 
if there was but little accumulated wealth 
in the early days of our national history, 
there was but little poverty, and conse- 
quently but few social distinctions, and the 
natural resources of the country then as 
now afforded remarkable facilities to all 
who were willing and able to work for 
earning a comfortable livelihood. With the 
gradual accumulation of wealth, the utili- 
zation of natural forces through the agency 
of machinery, and the great improvements 
in the means of transportation, the consum- 
ing power of the masses has also greatly in- 
creased, and many things which were once 
regarded as luxuries have come to be con- 
sidered by even the humblest in the light 
of necessities. But it can not, at the same 
time, be doubted that the general tendency 
of events during the last quarter of a cen- 
tury of our national history has been to 
more unequally distribute the results of in- 
dustrial effort, to accumulate great fortunes 
in a few bauds — in short, to cause the rich 



SOCIAL CONDITION OF LABORERS. 



173 



to grow richer ani the poor poorer. Such 
results, however, can not he referred to any- 
one cause, but they are primarily due to 
an abandonment of that spirit of economy 
which so pre-eminently characterized our 
ancestors ; to a marked decrease in the effi- 
ciency of labor ; to a continual, if not in- 
creasing, use of artificial stimulants ; to the 
crowding of population in large industrial 
and commercial centres ; to war ; to the in- 
terference of legislation with the freedom of 
trade ; and latterly, to the use of an unsta- 
ble, fluctuating medium of exchange, which 
all experience shows is one of the greatest 
curses that can befall the laboring popula- 
tion of any country. 

As elements for estimating the social con- 
dition of laborers in the manufacturing in- 
dustries of the United States, the statistics 
of the wages paid in different occupations 
are most important ; and from the great 
mass of information on this subject which 
has recently been collected and published 
the following general items have been se- 
lected. Thus in Pennsylvania, the leading 
State in the production and fabrication of 
iron, the average earnings per annum in the 
different manufacturing establishments of 
the State for the years 1872-73 (as reported 
by the State Bureau of Statistics of Labor) 
were as follows : foremen, $638 per annum ; 
skilled workmen, $536 ; laborers, first-class, 
$402; laborers, second-class, $332; females 
above sixteen, $228 ; youths, apprentices, 
etc., $150. 

In Massachusetts for about the same pe- 
riod the average wages reported in the cot- 
ton-manufacturing industry were, for men, 
$403 per annum; women, $268; children, $134. 

In the silk industry the average earnings 
per hand in the most prosperous establish- 



ments probably approximate $335 per an- 
num as a maximum. 

In the woolen industry the average daily 
wages of 5500 operatives in the mills of 
Massachusetts were reported for the year 
1871 as follows : men, $1 62 per day ; women, 
$112; young persons, 94 cents; children, 
64 cents. 

In any limited review of the progress of 
a great nation for a period of one hundred 
years, in respect to any one of its leading 
departments of industry, much that is inter- 
esting and suggestive must of necessity be 
wholly omitted, and many things treated 
most superficially. But a general conclu- 
sion to which a study of all the facts con- 
nected with our national development from 
the time of the founding the first colonies 
in the wilderness to the epoch of the Decla- 
ration of Independence, and from the estab- 
lishment of peace and the adoption of the 
Federal Constitution to the present hour, is 
that the progress of the country, especially 
in respect to its manufacturing industry, 
and through what may be termed its ele- 
ment of vitality, is independent of legisla- 
tion, and even of the impoverishment and 
waste of a great war. Like one of our 
mighty rivers, its movement is beyond con- 
trol. Successive years, like successive afflu- 
ents, only add to and increase its volume, 
while legislative enactments and conflicting 
commercial and fiscal policies, like the con- 
struction of piers and the deposits of sunken 
wrecks, simply deflect the current or consti- 
tute temporary obstructions. In fact, if the 
nation in all respects has not yet been lifted 
to a full comprehension of its own work, it 
builds steadily and detenuinately, and, as it 
were, by instinct. 



IV. 

AGRICULTURAL PROGRESS. 



THE early colonists of the United States 
were largely agriculturists, or became 
so within a very few years after their ar- 
rival. A hundred and fifty years before our 
Independence, agriculture had already a 
promising foot-hold in several places within 
our present domain ; a full century before 
the same date in our history the settle- 
ments were quite widely extended, near- 
ly all the useful domestic animals and cul- 
tivated plants of Europe had been tried on 
our soil, and most of those we now have 
were already in successful use. 

New and peculiar problems were present- 
ed to the new settlers. In the New World 
they found every thing new. The wild 
plants were new to them, and the good or 
bad qualities of each could only be learned 
by experience, for whether a plant was to 
be a valuable forage plant or a pestilent 
weed could not be foretold. Their crops 
as well as their flocks were subject to rav- 
ages by new enemies. Emigrants from near- 
ly every part of Europe brought with them 
the useful plants they had known at home. 
But from whatever country they came, and 
wherever they settled here, they found a 
climate unlike any they had known before. 
In the North they encountered a most try- 
ing climate, where an almost arctic winter 
was followed by a semi-tropical summer; 
the severity of the winter prevented the 
success of some of the crops which flourish- 
ed well during summer, while the drier air, 
clearer sky, and more fervid sun of summer 
proved unpropitious to others. The warm- 
er parts, too, were unlike the warmer parts 
of Europe. As a consequence, the adapta- 
bility of each crop to our climate had to be 
tried for itself in each locality. This great 
experiment went on until one by one these 
questions were settled. Some crops, after 
repeated failures, were abandoned, and oth- 
ers found their appropriate localities. Hemp, 
indigo, rice, cotton, madder, millet, spelt, 
lentils, lucern, sainfoin, etc., were tried and 
failed in New England, as did other croj)S 
in the Southern colonies. Not only the 



plants of Europe, but many from Asia and 
the East Indies, were tried, including such 
spices as cinnamon, also various commer- 
cial plants. Some of these crops, on ex- 
periment, failed entirely. Others flourish- 
ed after a fashion, but proved unprofitable ; 
others flourished with peculiar luxuriance, 
and with characters unchanged; and still 
others, under the new conditions, assumed 
new characters or excellences. Before the 
war of the Eevolution these trials had been 
made along or near the coast from Maine to 
Texas, and so completely had this century 
and a half of experiments solved the great 
problems of adaptation, acclimation (and 
often naturalization), that not a single im- 
portant species of domestic animal has been 
profitably introduced since, and but one 
plant, sorghum, since added is of sufficient 
importance to be recognized in our official 
statistics. 

The agriculture of most civilized coun- 
tries is based on the rearing and use of cer- 
tain domestic animals, and these in turn 
depend on the pastures and meadows. The 
only exception to this is where the cultiva- 
tion of commercial plants greatly predom- 
inates over all other crops. The forage 
grasses used in Europe were practically in- 
digenous there, and were such as ages of 
cultivation or use had adapted to the condi- 
tions there found. In Great Britain, and 
perhaps also throughout Northern Europe, 
the actual cultivation of their native grass- 
es only became common toward the close of 
the last century. Before that they knew lit- 
tle or nothing of seeding lands to grass, and 
their pastures and meadows were fostered 
rather than cultivated. Such cultivation, 
however, had sprung up in the colonies 
much earlier, and from dire necessity. Of 
nearly 300 species of grasses now known to 
be indigenous to some part of the United 
States, very few indeed seem well adapted 
to cultivation. Perhaps more than nine- 
tenths of the forage of to-day in the culti- 
vated parts of this country is furnished by 
plants introduced. How and why the arti- 



AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS. 



175 



ficial production of pastures and meadows 
and the cultivation of the true grasses 
sprung up in the American colonies north 
of the Chesapeake, how the grasses which 
we derived from Europe, half wild, were 
caught and tamed, as it were, and sent back 
for cultivation, is an interesting chapter in 
the history of American agriculture in colo- 
nial times, hut it requires more space than 
we can give it in this review, and is only 
alluded to because of its relation to stock- 
raising, to be noticed later. 

Agriculture as an art had reached nearly 
as high a point a hundred years ago as it 
occupies to-day, but agriculture as a science 
has nearly its whole history in the century 
we are to consider. Science belongs to no 
particular nation; and thus it is that we 
can not consider the agricultural progress 
of the United States entirely independent 
of that of other lands: it forms too inti- 
mate a part of the agricultural progress 
of the age. 

The century is especially characterized 
in history by mechanical invention and by 
the growth of the so - called natural sci- 
ences, these two beiug intimately related ; 
and it is through them that all the greater 
changes have occurred. 

The mechanical progress of the century 
has been so fully treated in previous papers 
that its relations to agriculture will in this 
be treated only incidentally ; but all im- 
provements in tillage, in planting, in har- 
vesting, in preparing for market, and in 
transportation are related to the subject 
under consideration. 

The " Centennial of Chemistry" was cel- 
ebrated in both Europe and America in 
1874. The specific branch of that science, 
agricultural chemistry, belongs properly to 
this century only. Through its influence 
have come more philosophical theories of 
the rotation of crops, of the nature and use 
of manures ; and the whole commerce in 
and manufacture of " commercial fertiliz- 
ers" is the direct result of this science. It 
has, moreover, thrown great light on the 
nature of the soil and its tillage, on drain- 
ing and irrigation, on the nutrition and fat- 
tening of animals, and the production of 
wool, flesh, butter, and cheese. Moreover, 
chemistry, in its extensive applications in 
various manufacturing processes, has intro- 



duced new uses for agricultural products as 
raw material. 

The biological sciences have aided in their 
way. The laws of vegetable and animal 
growth are better understood, and by the 
application of this knowledge old varieties 
and breeds are improved with more ease and 
certainty, and new ones are made at pleas- 
ure for specific uses. 

In noting our agricultural progress along 
the three ways indicated, that produced by 
mechanical invention comes naturally first, 
but the three classes of improvemeuts are 
parallel, and each blends with the other 
along nearly the entire course. 

The first and most obvious aid of mechan- 
ical invention has been to lessen the amount 
of human labor required to produce a given 
amount of agricultural product. For many 
of the processes new machines have been 
devised, and in those cases where old kinds 
of implements or tools have remained in use, 
they have been improved in quality, aud 
usually cheapened in price. The simpler 
tools of a century ago were made mostly on 
the farms where they were to be used, or by 
the neighboring mechanic. They were usu- 
ally heavy and costly to use, that is, costly 
in labor. With the specialization of labor, 
and the use of special machinery for the 
purpose, the manufacture of agricultural 
implements has become a great industry, 
the last national census enumerating over 
2000 establishments, the value of whose 
products for that year amounted to over 
$50,000,000, the value of the product in 1850 
having been less than $7,000,000. The val- 
ue of the farming implements in use on 
the farms in 1870 was about $337,000,000, 
while in 1850 it was only about $152,000,000. 
These figures of manufacture and use at 
these two periods indicate extraordinary 
progress in agricultural operations in those 
twenty years. 

This will be more apparent if we consider, 
in a general way, the different processes. 
First, as regards the implements of tillage, 
we may say that either old ones have been 
improved or new ones devised. Scarcely 
one remains in its old state. Some of the 
improvements economize power, others ma- 
terial, and others time : and what the aggre- 
gate cheapening of labor in tillage actually 
is it is impossible to say. A single laborer 



176 



AGRICULTURAL PROGRESS. 



can certainly till more than twice the acre- 
age, and with some crops three, four, or five 
times as much. Beginning with the im- 
provement in hoes and simple tools, then 
passing to iron or steel plows, cultivators, 
horse -hoes, pulverizers, crushers, etc., the 
entire process of tillage has been modified, 
and animal power performs much that was 
then done by human muscle. Steam tillage 
is on trial, or at least steam plowing is, but 
is not yet common enough to be considered 
more than a limited experiment. 

Drilling machines for planting certain 
crops were used to a limited extent before 
the Revolution. In Eliot's "Fifth Essay 
on Field Husbandry," published in 1754, he 
says : 

" Mr. Tull's Wheat Drill is a wonderf nil Invention, 
but it being the first invented of that Kind, no Won- 
der if it be intricate, as indeed it is, and consists of 
more Wheels and other Parts than there is really any 
Need of. This I was very sensible of all along, but 
knew not how to mend it. Therefore I applied my- 
self to the Reverend Mr. Clap, President of Yale Col- 
ledge, and desired him for the regard he had for the 
Publick and to me that he would apply his mathemat- 
ical Learning and mechanical Genius in that Affair; 
which he did to so good Purpose that this new mod- 
elled Drill can be made for the fourth Part of what 
Mr. TulVs will cost." 

We find that a drill for spreading manure 
was soon afterward devised, and various 
drills have been in use ever since. The 
history of the above drill has been repeat- 
ed in numerous instances. The more intri- 
cate and expensive machines of Europe 
have been simplified and cheapened here, 
and thus brought into quicker use. The 
threshing machine and reaper were both 
undoubtedly invented in Great Britain, but 
in America they were simplified, cheapened, 
and, to use an Americanism, were made 
handier, hence more practical. Although 
drills thus early came into use, nearly all 
the planting was done by hand until less 
than forty years ago, particularly for the ce- 
reals. Now drills or sowers of some kind are 
in almost universal use on the larger farms. 
The improvement for harvesting has been 
much greater than for either tillage or plant- 
ing. Previous to 1850 the scythe and sickle 
were the almost universal tools for cutting, 
and the common use of the modern reaper 
and mower dates back but about twenty 
years. Labor has always been dearer here 
than in Europe, hence the sickle was never 



so much used as was the scythe. As to 
what its capacity was here we have no pre- 
cise data. Experiments and estimates pub- 
lished by the Highland Agricultural Society 
in Scotland in 1844, and approvingly quoted 
by standard authorities on British agricul- 
ture later, give " the average quantities of 
ground reaped by seven persons, on an aver- 
age of ten hours' work," as one to one and a 
half acres of wheat, and two to three acres of 
oats and barley. (A bandwin of reapers con- 
sists usually of seven persons, who cut, bind, 
and stook the grain.) By the use of the 
cradle in this country, one and a half acres 
of wheat was not a large day's work to be 
cut by one man, raked, bound, and stooked 
by two others, but this was doubtless above 
the average. With hay, two acres per day 
is a reasonably large amount. At a recent 
meeting of a certain State Board of Agri- 
culture, in a discussion concerning hay, the 
belief was concurred in that "hired labor 
with a scythe mows much less than one and 
a half acres per day per man on the aver- 
age." It is safe to say that a man with a 
team of horses and modern mower or reap- 
er will average about six times as much as 
with a scythe. Under the best conditions 
more is done (we hear of fifteen or twenty 
acres sometimes), but the average would be 
not far from this estimate. With our hay 
crop nearly every step in the process has 
been changed. The horse-rake came into 
general use before the reaper, the tedder 
and horse-fork later. A century ago all 
the processes were by hand labor ; now the 
only labor performed in the old way is 
pitching on the load, loading, hauling, and 
stowing or stacking, and each of these is 
done with improved tools. 

To obtain the most profitable yield of hay 
or grain, it must be cut and secured at just 
the right time, hence with most crops this 
has always been considered the most critical 
period, and the labor then required brings 
the highest wages. If cut too early, it is 
immature ; if too late, it deteriorates or 
wastes. Moreover, it is then especially 
subject to damage by unfavorable weather. 
Taking all these into account, it is seen 
that the actual gain to agriculture by the 
use of the various harvesting machines 
can not be measured by merely noting 
the relative areas operated on by a man 



PREPARATION FOR MARKET. 



177 



in a given time by the old methods com- 
pared with the new. 

With the great crops of cotton, Indian 
corn, potatoes, and tobacco there has been 
no such great advance. With cotton, the 
nature of the crop and the prolonged har- 
vest forbid hope for much improvement, 
and a similar condition exists in the case of 
tobacco. With potatoes and Indian corn 
there have been many attempts, with but 
very moderate success as yet. 

Intimately connected with the harvest is 
the preparation for market ; and in this the 
progress, as a whole, has been even more 
marked than in either of the processes al- 
ready noticed. The most illustrious exam- 
ple is seen in the cotton crop. In no other 
case has tbe cultivation of a great staple by 
people of European civilization depended 
for its success upon the solution of a single 
and simple mechanical problem. We hear 
of cotton being planted in our colonies as 
early as 1621, and again, in the Carolinas, 
in 1G6G, and during the century after the 
last date it is often spoken of. It was tried 
over and over again along nearly the whole 
extent of the colonies. Eliot, in his " Second 
Essay on Field Husbandry," published in 
1749, tells of his experiments with it in Con- 
necticut. It appears to have been, how- 
ever, a rather rare garden plant until just 
after the close of the Revolutionary war, 
when it was introduced anew, and soon aft- 
er that its field cultivation began. But its 
production was extremely limited by tbe 
cost of getting it ready for market. Hand 
labor was expensive ; and so long as a la- 
borer could prepare but a single "pound 
per day" there could be no great breadth of 
culture, no matter how fertile and cheap 
the soil, how favorable the climate, or how 
complete the means of tillage. The inven- 
tion of the cotton-gin in 1793 placed it on 
the same level with other field products. 
Since then the rapid increase of its produc- 
tion is one of the marvels of the century. 
A single generation saw the crop grow from 
nothing to be the great commercial plant 
of the world, constituting, some years, five- 
sixths of our entire agricultural exports. 
The relations of this growth to the civil- 
ization and prosperity of many countries, 
and especially its relations to our own so- 
cial and political history, furnish perhaps 
12 



the most romantic chapter in the retrospect 
of agriculture. 

Threshing machines for our cereals were 
practically unknown here before the pres- 
ent century. We infer from the journals 
of that day that they came into somewhat 
common use in Great Britain between 1810 
and 1820 ; their universal use there was 
still later by some years, the flail continu- 
ing to be a common implement down to 
1850. 

The dearness of labor and other reasons 
caused the flail to be used relatively less in 
this country than in Europe, yet it was not 
a rare implement by any means down to 
1830 or later. Grain was, however, usually 
trodden out with horses, or threshed by 
dragging over it a great roller armed with 
large wooden pins. This was an approved 
implement, and received the official recom- 
mendation of at least one agricultural soci- 
ety as late as 1816, and the writer has seen 
it in use as late as 1835. In the better farm- 
ing regions of the Middle States, early in the 
present century, eight to twelve bushels of 
wheat per day were considered a good aver- 
age for a man to thresh with a flail. Thresh- 
ing was largely done in the winter, and 
where horses were used to tread out the 
grain, twenty -three to thirty bushels per 
day for three horses and a man and boy 
were common results. The average was 
perhaps not much above the lowest figures 
here given. To illustrate : in a specific case 
in 1826, on one farm in a prosperous and 
old farming region, 1300 bushels of wheat 
were threshed, the grain winnowed, and 
the straw drawn from the barn to a neigh- 
boring field, in twelve weeks, two men and 
five horses performing the labor. This was 
considered, in that neighborhood, good work. 
Before 1825 threshing machines were very 
rare in this country, but between that date 
and 1835 their use spread rapidly, and be- 
fore 1840 comparatively little of the cereal 
grains was threshed by other means. For 
cleaning grain the hand fan was extensive- 
ly employed in 1776, but fanning-mills came 
into common use long before threshing ma- 
chines. The first threshing machines mere- 
ly threshed, next separators were added, 
and then " cleaners ;" and now the grain 
is threshed and cleaned for market in one 
operation. Horses were the universal power 



178 



AGRICULTURAL PROGRESS. 



applied until quite lately. Now steam-pow- 
er is extensively used, particularly in the 
Western States and in California. Horse- 
power, however, is still in general use. 

What the possible capacity of the modern 
thresher is, when working under the most 
favorable conditions, although an interest- 
ing question, is not the one we have to con- 
sider here, but rather what is the average 
of good work, or work that can be common- 
ly hoped for by good farmers. The larger 
machines are mostly employed in doing cus- 
tom work, and time is lost in passing from 
farm to farm, and in the delays which are 
unavoidable in work affected by so many 
conditions. A steam-thresher, under such 
conditions as they have in California, will 
thresh, in actual practice, from 40,000 to 
100,000 bushels of grain in a "season" of 
three months. With such a machine, oper- 
ated by a gang of eighteen hands, whose 
combined wages (in the year 1874) would 
amount to forty-three dollars per day, 2000 
bushels of wheat per day is fair work. A 
recent agricultural journal states of the act- 
ual practice that the " full capacity of such 
a machine is 1500 sacks a day, the average 
work about 1000, holding over two bushels 
each." This means that the grain is thresh- 
ed, cleaned, put in sacks, and the sacks piled 
up ready for removal by cars or team, and 
amounts to over a hundred bushels per day 
per man. Vastly larger figures are cited 
for short periods under exceptionally favor- 
able conditions. The agricultural papers 
of the same State mention incidentally, as 
a local news item, a horse-power machine 
which averaged 1500 bushels of wheat per 
day for thirty-one successive days, moving 
on twenty -eight different farms in that 
time, and speak of another (also horse- 
power) which in 1874 threshed and cleaned 
80,400 bushels iu fifty-two days, of which 
11,300 bushels were threshed in five and a 
half days. 

The effect of these improved methods is 
best seen by noting the total saving of the 
several processes. A hundred years ago, to 
cut a hundred bushels of wheat required 
about three days' work (which could not be 
delegated to other power) ; to bind and stook 
it, four days; to thresh and clean it, five 
days, which, with the other processes be- 
tween the standing grain and the merchant- 



able product, would amount to some fifteen 
days' actual manual (and mostly very hard) 
labor for each hundred bushels. The av- 
erage was doubtless more than this, that 
is, a day's labor would not get more than 
six or seven bushels of grain through these 
processes. 

The president of an agricultural society 
in California in 1866 stated that on his farm 
that year 40,318 bushels of grain (three- 
fourths of it wheat) were harvested, thresh- 
ed, cleaned for the market, and stored in 
the granaries in thirty-six days, including 
all delays, with an average of twenty-two 
hands. This is an average of about fifty 
bushels per man per day for the entire crop. 
Much larger figures are reported in other 
cases of later date ; but the exact data are 
not at hand. 

While such progress has not marked the 
gathering and preparing of all the crops, 
yet it has extended to so many of them that 
all the more laborious processes have been 
revolutionized. 

It must be borne in mind that mechanical 
invention has not only aided agriculture, 
but that in turn it has been stimulated by 
the wants of agriculture, and some of the 
most profitable patents have been in this 
direction, and we get a vivid idea of the 
demand and supply of new methods and ap- 
pliances in the fact that the Patent-office 
issues about twelve hundred patents per 
year relating to agriculture. 

It is through the aids of mechanical in- 
vention, including the means of transpor- 
tation, that what is known as " the Great 
West" has been so rapidly settled and its 
products made accessible to the world. 

That soils became exhausted by cropping, 
and that the exhaustion could be checked 
by manuring, were facts well enough known 
from remote antiquity: the philosophical 
reason why was left for agricultural chem- 
istry to discover. So soon as chemical 
analysis became established on a reasonably 
sure foundation, and chemistry began to as- 
sume the character of an exact science, 
practical applications to agriculture began 
to follow. Chemical experiments relating 
to this art had been made earlier by Arthur 
Young and others, but agricultural chemis- 
try, as the science we now know it, began 
with Sir Humphry Davy. He first lectured 



AGRICULTURAL CHEMISTRY. 



179 



before the English Board of Agriculture in 
1802. He experimented on guano, phos- 
phates, and various other manures, and an- 
alyzed them. He lectured again before the 
Board of Agriculture in 1812, and these lect- 
ures furnished the basis of his Elements of 
Agricultural Chemistry, published in 1813. 
This work was extensively read, and was 
translated and printed in several languages. 
During the next thirty years there were 
numerous experimenters, and it was a pe- 
riod rich in discoveries in chemistry. Spren- 
gel made many analyses of the ashes of 
plants about 1832, and then came the works 
of Johnston, Mulder, and others ; but it was 
left to Liebig to bring order out of the 
great mass of experiment and theory which 
had accumulated, and to really place agri- 
cultural chemistry on its present founda- 
tion. His Chemistry in its Applications to 
Agriculture and Physiology appeared in 1840, 
and soon after Boussingault published his 
Economic Rurale. Johnston published his 
Lectures on the Applications of Chemistry and 
Geology to Agriculture in 1844, since which 
time works on this department of science 
have been particularly numerous. While 
the science has had most of its development 
in Europe, America has not been without 
its workers, and the later writings of Pro- 
fessor Johnson have been republished in 
Europe in the English, German, Swedish, 
and Russian languages. 

" The art of manuring" was a favorite 
theme in olden times, and it was an art 
brought to high perfection ; but it follow- 
ed experience only. With the aid of chem- 
istry the art assumed the features of a sci- 
ence. Manures known before were used to 
better advantage, rare ones brought into 
greater prominence, and new ones devised. 
The introduction of turnips and clover into 
extensive cultivation in England about the 
time of the American Revolution, and the 
great rise in rents soon after, produced a 
radical change in the systems of rotation 
and tillage, and the discoveries in chemis- 
try came in at just the right time to supple- 
ment this. Bones had long been used, but 
their special merits were pointed out by 
Davy, and soon their use became very ex- 
tensive. Then followed the manufacture 
of superphosphates. To show what great 
and speedy chancres were wrought through 



these means, where mechanical invention 
had but little to do with results, a single 
illustration may be given. A light-house, 
known as the Dunston Pillar, was built on 
the Lincoln Heath, in Lincolnshire, about 
the middle of the last century. This was 
said to be the only land light-house known. 
It was built to guide travelers over the bar- 
ren and dreary waste, and it long fulfilled 
its useful purpose. This pillar, no longer a 
light-house, now stands in the midst of a fer- 
tile and wealthy farming region, where all 
the land i3 in high cultivation. For twen- 
ty-five years no barren moors have been in 
sight even from its top. Turnips and phos- 
phates were the principal means through 
which this great change came. In this 
country the abundance of fertile soil and 
its cheapness, and the cost of labor, while 
inducing the use of improved implements 
and machines earlier than in Europe, hin- 
dered rather than accelerated the use of 
chemical aids. It was easier to break new 
land, particularly if it were prairie, than it 
was to renovate the old. For a long while 
bones were extensively exported from this 
country to England, but since the year 1850 
the use of commercial fertilizers has been 
rapidly increasing, until now it has reached 
immense proportions. 

The history of the use of guano is some- 
what similar to that of the phosphates. 
This material has been in use as a manure 
on the western side of South America for 
centuries, and from time to time its merits 
were spoken of in European publications. 1 
Its use, however, remained local until it was 
prominently brought into notice by the 
modern agricultural chemists. How early it 
was brought to Europe can not now be as- 
certained. Sir Humphry Davy experiment- 
ed with it as early as 1805; but it was not 
until after the recommendations of Liebig 
that it began to be an article of commerce. 
A few casks were imported into England in 
1840 " as an experiment." It was followed 
by 2000 tons the next year, and in sixteen 

i In The Art of Metals, written " in the kingdom of 
Peru, in the West Indies, in the year 1640," translated 
and published in London in 16T4, it is said that " out of 
the Islands of the South Sea, not far from the City of 
Arica, they fetch earth called Guano," etc. And then 
follows a description, and the statement that it is used 
for manure, and that the fields are " put in heart there- 
by for 100 years after." 



180 



AGRICULTURAL PROGRESS. 



years its aggregated sales in Great Britain 
were reported at 100,000,000 of dollars. Its 
use began in this country somewhat later, 
the aggregate imports previous to 1850 
amounting to less than 30,000 tons. At 
present it supports a vast commerce, regu- 
lated by special national treaties, and em- 
ploys hundreds of ships and millions of 
capital in its transportation. 

Along with the importation of guano 
and the development of beds of mineral 
manures and their preparation, comes the 
manufacture of commercial fertilizers, one 
of the most rapidly - growing of our in- 
dustries. This enterprise is of very re- 
cent origin in this country, but in 1870 
more than four millions of capital were 
employed in this branch of manufacture, 
and the value of the products amounted 
to $6,000,000. The official estimates place 
the present product several times higher. 
Gypsum, which was not included in the 
above estimate, was used sparingly in co- 
lonial times, but to most farmers it was 
then an unheard-of substance. It was 
prominently brought into notice by Benja- 
min Franklin, after his return from France, 
but its rapid spread kept pace with that of 
the cultivation of clover between 1810 and 
1830. At the last census there were 321 
mills, the value of the ground product 
amounting to about §2,500,000, a part of 
which, however, is applied to other uses in 
the arts. 

From the nature of the case, the actual 
value of these new aids to American agri- 
culture can not be shown statistically. For 
obvious reasons, their greatest effect is as 
yet seen only in the older States and in the 
South. Throughout the North, where the 
farm-yard is, and perhaps always will be, 
the great source of farm fertilizers, these 
commercial manures come in as an auxil- 
iary : but farther south, and in those re- 
gions where the cattle roam the fields 
throughout the year, preventing farm-yard 
accumulations to any considerable extent, 
the case is quite different. As cotton and 
tobacco, the two great commercial crops, 
have been heretofore cultivated, exhaustion 
was inevitable. The history of a region com- 
prised, of necessity, first the settlement, 
then its rise and wealth during the increas- 
ing growth of the crop, then a period of 



prosperity of longer or shorter duration, 
regulated by the original fertility of the 
soil, and finally the inevitable decline. In 
actual history, many great plantations be- 
came so completely impoverished by crop- 
ping with tobacco that they were abandon- 
ed and returned to forest again, and more 
to sparsely peopled, impoverished places. 
The exhaustion by cotton-growing was 
similar, although not always so complete. 
The necessity of new lands for this crop 
when it was "king,'' and the connection of 
this necessity with political events, are fa- 
miliar to every student of our history, 
while its relation to fertilizers was gen- 
erally ignored. Here, as in Southern Eu- 
rope, "great political and social events had 
their foundation in the dunghill." 

The theory and largely the practice of 
tobacco and cotton cultivation are now 
changed, and we see no reason why, by the 
new methods, the profitable fertility of the 
soil may not be maintained indefinitely. 
Official reports in Georgia estimate that 
"the planters of that State pay over 
$10,000,000 for fertilizers"' annually; and 
single towns in the Connecticut Valley, 
where tobacco is the leading crop, in ad- 
dition to the home fertilizers, pay from 
$30,000 to $50,000 a year for those from 
outside sources. 

To follow up this subject in its relations 
to the price of real estate, to vegetable or 
"market" farming near our cities, to other 
manufactures whose waste products are 
utilized, to the great question of the use of 
sewage and its relations to public health, 
would lead us entirely beyond the limits of 
this paper. 

Draining and irrigation, although strictly 
mechanical processes, have been the subjects 
of much chemical investigation. Thorough 
under-draining was practiced to some ex- 
tent long ago, but has only come into ex- 
tensive use during the last sixty or seventy 
years even in Great Britain. In this coun- 
try its use is more modern. Xoah Webster, 
in an agricultural address published in 1818, 
speaks of " the art of draining wet lands, 
which is now in its infancy in this coun- 
try." John Johnston, a Scottish farmer still 
living near Geneva, New York, was the first 
in the United States to use tiles, about 1S35, 
making the tiles by hand after Scotch mod- 



VARIETIES OF CROPS. 



181 



els. The few under-drains made earlier, as 
indeed many made since, were of stone. 
John Delafield, a neighhor of Mr. Johnston, 
and a man noted for his interest in agricul- 
ture, imported a tile machine in 1848, the 
first one in this country. The practice is 
now common enough, but there are no sta- 
tistics to show the amount of land drained. 

Irrigation has only come into any consid- 
erable use in those Western regions where 
the rain-fall is insufficient for all the pur- 
poses of agriculture. It is as yet carried 
on, for the most part, on a small scale and 
by private capital. Vast schemes are dis- 
cussed or projected, but we must leave their 
results to the future. 

We have already alluded to the class of 
improvements introduced through or aided 
by the biological sciences. We have al- 
ready said that a hundred years ago all our 
specks of field crops, except sorghum, were 
already in cultivation here. While this is 
true, the number of varieties of these crops 
then was less. A neighborhood would know 
perhaps three or four varieties of each spe- 
cies, rarely more. About that time many 
farmers began to grow more kinds, in order 
that if one failed because of a bad season, 
others might succeed. Old varieties were 
slowly improved by careful selection of 
seed, but the occurrence of new ones de- 
pended on accident, or on causes not then 
understood. Late in the last century and 
early in this the facts relating to the pro- 
duction of new varieties of cultivated plants 
began to be studied by new methods, and, 
through the observations and experiments 
of botanists and gardeners rather than by 
farmers, the laws came to be better under- 
stood. As a result of this knowledge, vari- 
eties are now multiplied almost at pleasure, 
and the kinds in cultivation, or at least 
known, amount to hundreds or even thou- 
sands for each species. As an example, we 
may mention potatoes. Deane, in his New 
England Farmer, a dictionary which profess- 
es to contain " a compendious account" of 
" the Art of Husbandry as practiced to the 
greatest Advantage in this Country," pub- 
lished at Boston in 1790, says, "No longer 
ago than the year 1740 we had but one sort, 
a small reddish-colored potato, of so rank a 
taste that it was scarcely eatable." He then 
enumerates twelve varieties known up to 



the date of writing, which had originated 
in various countries, some in the Old World. 
The paucity of kinds was often spoken of 
by writers before the Revolution. Guided 
by the knowledge since gained, a single 
American experimenter claims to have pro- 
duced and tested 6000 different varieties. 
Other crops have a similar but not quite so 
striking a history. Several hundred varie- 
ties of wheat were grown and tried by one 
farmer in the Genesee Valley all in thirty 
years. This has given so ample means of 
selection, of choosing just the best kind 
for each soil and condition, that there is 
doubtless a great actual increase in pro- 
duction due to it, but its most obvious 
effect is to give us a choice as to quality. 
With fruits this application of science has 
had even more remarkable results than 
with grains. 

Although but few field crops have been 
introduced since 1776, this is not true of 
field weeds. Some which actually came ear- 
lier only became numerous and troublesome 
later, and others were then introduced. 
Several local traditions exist in the New 
England and Middle States of weeds intro- 
duced by the British armies and their allies 
during that war, which have spread and 
maintained a foot-hold ever since. On the 
other hand, it is questionable if science has 
aided in the suppression of weeds except in 
a very general way. 

Columbus, on his second voyage to Amer- 
ica, brought various kinds of domestic ani- 
mals with him, and importations have been 
frequent nearly ever since. In our own 
colonies there were many importations, and 
from several countries, from the north of 
Europe direct and from Southern Europe by 
way of the Spanish-American colonies. The 
live stock in existence at the time of the 
Revolution was the mongrel progeny of 
these numerous importations. There is no 
question but that the domestic animals in- 
troduced from Europe rapidly deteriorated 
here. Various travelers have borne testi- 
mony to this, and indeed it was to be ex- 
pected. The pastures of Europe were such 
as fostering care for ages had made them, 
and, as already said, of peculiarly nutritious 
grasses. The early colonists found only 
crude grasses, and no natural meadows bet- 



182 



AGRICULTURAL PROGRESS. 



ter than the salt-marshes near the coast or 
the coarse sedges hy some of the streams. 
The pasturage in the forests was meagre. 
In the winter, straw, corn stalks, or in places 
wild marsh hay and the browse of the woods, 
were all the miserable animals had. Spring 
usually found the flock or herd reduced in 
numbers, poor, and weak. Too often the 
farmer's first work of the spring morning 
was to assist the weakened creatures to rise 
to their feet, and several native plants had 
reputation for strengthening cattle so that 
they could get up alone when weakened by 
the winter's starvation. The colonists ear- 
ly learned to plant grass seed from Europe, 
and to plant corn for the animals. Tur- 
nips, so valuable in the north of Europe, 
were of little value here. In the South they 
did not flourish well ; in the North they grew 
well enough, but being very watery in their 
nature, and the winters being so cold, they 
froze very readily, and thus their value was 
greatly diminished. Maize was made to 
Take their place, and sometimes beans were 
sparingly cultivated ; but with this crop, 
again, we had to learn by experience and 
disappointment. The field bean of Europe 
did not thrive well here. It struggled for 
cultivation for more than a century, and 
was finally abandoned as a field crop. Oth- 
er kinds of beans, however, partially took 
its place. Clover was introduced from En- 
gland quite early last century. Eliot speaks 
in its praise as early as 1747, but for some 
reason it did not come into common use un- 
til sixty or seventy years later. It is, there- 
fore, no wonder that all kinds of live stock 
deteriorated, that they fell an easy prey to 
the wolves, and that they only began to 
thrive successfully after so long experiment 
and so bitter experience. It must be re- 
membered, too, that the laws of breeding 
were not then well understood ; but special 
attention was given to this practical ques- 
tion during the last half of the last century. 
Sebright published about 1773, and Bake- 
well's experiments were then in full prog- 
ress ; and although he died without giving 
the secret of his successes to the world, the 
results were seen and many of the condi- 
tions known. In this period the breeding 
of all kinds of animals received special at- 
tention, and while the more scientific prob- 
lems were being solved abroad, the colonists 



here had solved those of forage, acclima- 
tion, and adaptation. 

Several of the more valued breeds of 
neat cattle were established early in the 
Old World, and improved during the period 
spoken of. Pedigrees began to be carefully 
looked after. The first volume of the En- 
glish Short-horn Herd-Book appeared in 1822, 
but its pedigrees began at about this period, 
or a little earlier. Only thirty animals are 
recorded that flourished in 1780 and earlier ; 
and while the blood of unrecorded animals 
afterward came in, for present purposes the 
pedigrees of all the thousands of thorough- 
bred short-horns date back to about that 
time, theoretically at least. Precisely when 
the first importations of this breed were 
made to this country is uncertain. It is 
now believed that they occurred very soon 
after the Revolutionary war, and there are 
traditions of several importations before 
1800. Soon after that date importations 
began in earnest, and have gone on ever 
since. The first volume of the American 
Short-horn Herd-Book was published in 1846, 
the thirteenth in 1874, and in the series are 
recorded some 33,000 pedigrees. Certain 
strains of this breed have thrived peculiar- 
ly well here, and the sale of one herd, Sep- 
tember 10, 1873, at New York Mills, was 
doubtless the most extraordinary cattle sale 
that has ever taken place any where. At 
this sale 109 head sold for about $382,000, or 
an average of over $3500 per head, the high- 
er prices being $40,600 for a cow, and several 
sold for over $20,000 each, a calf but five 
months old selling for $27,000. The Devons 
were also introduced early, and previous to 
1840 were imported more abundantly than 
the short-horns, and have perhaps had as 
wide an influence on the improvement of 
American cattle as the last-named breed, 
or even a wider. Now all the more distin- 
guished breeds of Europe are successfully 
bred here, and some five or six of the more 
numerous or important have American herd- 
books now published. 

The effect of all this has been to enor- 
mously elevate the quality of American 
cattle ; and so completely has the mongrel 
or "native" stock been improved through 
these that in certain agricultural societies 
where premiums are offered for the best 
" natives" it is found that all that are offer- 



LIVE STOCK. 



183 



ed as such are, in fact, " grades," having had 
an infusion of better blood witbin three or 
four generations. Even the Spanish cattle 
of Texas and California are being rapidly 
changed and improved through and by these 
better breeds. 

The history of American horses is in most 
respects similar to tbat of the cattle. There 
was at first deterioration, but in a less de- 
gree, then a slow improvement through se- 
lection and better feeding, then a more 
rapid improvement through better breeding 
and the importation of better stock. The 
race of trotters is peculiarly American. It 
originated here, and is here found in its 
greatest development. It appears to have 
followed and been caused by the introduc- 
tion and improvement in light carriages. 
The thorough-breds of Europe, the race- 
horse and the hunter, are essentially run- 
ning horses. For American uses trotters 
were needed ; various causes tended to 
make them popular, and in the last fifty 
years the breed has been made. It has a 
large infusion of the English thorough-bred 
in it, yet few noted trotters are thorough- 
breds. The gait and speed are in part the 
result of training, and are in part hereditary. 
There has been a constantly augmenting 
speed and a great increase in the number 
of horses that are fast trotters. But a few 
years ago the speed of a mile in two ami a 
half minutes was unheard of; now per- 
haps 500 or 600 horses are known to have 
trotted a mile in that time. 

There is no question but that, as a whole, 
the quality of American horses has greatly 
improved in the hundred years. It was be- 
lieved that the great increase of railroads 
Avould diminish the number required, but, 
as a fact, the reverse is true. 

American sheep before 1776 were all 
coarse-wooled and mostly very inferior ani- 
mals. In Europe the fine-wooled breeds 
were shut up in Spain, and various causes 
prevented the exportation of the English 
improved coarse-wooled breeds. Eliot, in his 
" First Essay" (1747), says : " A better Breed 
of Sheep is what we want. The English Breed 
of Cotswold Sheep can not be obtained, or 
at least without great Difficulty : for Wool 
and live Sheep are contraband Goods, 
which all Strangers are prohibited from 
carrying out on Pain of having the right 



Hand cut off." Before 1800 there were a 
few importations of improved coarse-wooled 
sheep, and very many importations since. 
Merino sheep were carried into Saxony from 
Spain in 1765, into France about 1776, and 
England about 1790. Three merinoes were 
brought into the United States in 1793, but 
the person to whom they were presented 
not knowing their value, they were eaten 
for muttou. In 1801 or 1802 a few more 
came, and there were several small importa- 
tions from Spain aud France before 1815. 
The Saxon merino was introduced in 1824. 
Various causes led to wild speculation more 
than once in fine-wooled sheep in the United 
States, but they have increased now to many 
millions, and some of the most noted flocks 
of the world have been or are here. Indi- 
vidual animals have sold as high as $10,000 
and even ,$14,000. Both for fineness of fibre 
and weight of fleece the American wool is 
celebrated, and the finest fibre yet attained 
was from sheep bred in Western Pennsyl- 
vania about 1850. Since that time weight 
of fleece rather than excessive fineness has 
been bred for. The great pastures of Texas 
and California at home, and of Australia and 
South America, are now in competition iu 
the markets of the world, but the wool 
produced in some of the older States, par- 
ticularly in the Ohio Basin, is especially 
sought after by the manufacturers of the 
fiuer goods. 

The statistics of live stock in the United 
States as given in the last census are con- 
fessedly very imperfect, hence no numbers 
are here quoted except the aggregate value, 
which was estimated as amounting to up- 
ward of $1,500,000,000. 

Incidental to this branch of our subject, 
we may mention an American invention, the 
cheese-factory system. This was first put in 
operation in 1851 by Mr. Jesse Williams, in 
Oneida County, New York. Down to April, 
1860, twenty-one factories had been started. 
Then the increase was so rapid tbat by the 
end of 1866 there had been 500 factories 
erected in the State of New York alone, 
and the capital incidentally employed in 
the farms and stock amounted to at least 
$40,000,000. In 1870 there were over 1300 
factories iu operation in the country, pro- 
ducing about 55,000 tons of cheese. The 



184 



AGRICULTURAL PROGRESS. 



system is still growing here, and has ex- 
tended to foreign countries. 

The great improvements that have taken 
place in transportation, Avhich make it pos- 
sible for the wheat of Iowa and California 
to compete in the English markets with 
that raised on the Atlantic sea-hoard, and 
which place Iowa in competition with New 
England, have operated to specialize farm- 
ing. The large farmer of to-day raises fewer 
kinds on his farm than did the small farmer 
of the last century. This specialization al- 
lows the use of the higher appliances and 
the use of capital as the former system 
could not. The true farms have doubtless 
grown in size, on the average. The early 
settlers of necessity could till but small 
farms. The tax lists of Long Island for 
years between 1675 and 1685 show that in 
nine English towns the average land-hold- 
ing was about twenty-two acres, and in the 
five Dutch towns about thirty-seven acres, 
or for the whole fourteen towns it was twen- 
ty-five and one-third acres, and at that time 
over ninety per cent, of the tax-payers were 
laud-holders. The national census of 1870 
enumerates 2,660,000 farms, only six and a 
half per cent, of which were of less than ten 
acres, and more than half of the whole num- 
ber contained over fifty acres. The cash val- 
ue of the farms, implements, and live stock 
was placed at upward of $11,000,000,000, and 
the total estimated value of all the farm 
productions at about $2,448,000,000. Of the 
12,500,000 persons " engaged iu all classes of 
occupations," 6,000,000 were engaged in ag- 
riculture. We have absolutely no statistics 
of the agriculture of the colonies at the time 
of the Revolution ; therefore the actual fig- 
ures of progress can not be given, and we 
refrain from estimates. 

Agricultural newspapers, societies, schools, 
and literature hardly had an existence be- 
fore 1776. Less than forty newspapers were 
then published in the colonies, none of them 
agricultural. In 1870 there were ninety- 
three agricultural and horticultural news- 
papers and periodicals, with an aggregate 
annual issue of 21,500,000 copies. 

Agricultural societies were organized just 



after the Revolution ; exhibitions or " fairs" 
began between 1810 and 1820. It is believed 
that there are now 2000 agricultural socie- 
ties, clubs, and boards of agriculture organ- 
ized and in operation. Their annual "re- 
ports" amount to very many volumes. A 
few tracts and essays, which altogether 
would make but a single small volume, were 
the entire special agricultural literature the 
colonies produced. The agricultural liter- 
ature of to-day is confusing by its quantity 
and variety. 

Agricultural professorships were estab- 
lished in Europe some time last century, 
and the first agricultural school began in 
1799. In this country, Samuel L. Mitchill 
was made " Professor of Chemistry and Ag- 
riculture" in Columbia College, New York, 
in 1791, but there is no record that he gave 
special instruction in agriculture. In vari- 
ous colleges professors of general chemistry 
treated more or less of agricultural chemis- 
try. After special preparation for the office, 
John P. Norton was appointed " Professor 
of Agricultural Chemistry and Vegetable 
and Animal Physiology" in Yale College in 
1846, perhaps the first actual professor of 
agriculture in an American college. His 
instruction began in 1847, since which time 
numerous other similar professorships have 
been established. 

Agricultural schools and colleges were 
talked of for many years, and a few made 
an actual or nominal beginning before 1850, 
and several before 1860. In 1862 Congress 
appropriated certain lands to establish or 
aid schools in the various States, " without 
excluding other studies," to "teach such 
branches of learning as are related to agri- 
culture and the mechanic arts." Stimu- 
lated by this, and aided by private and 
State aid, about forty schools are now in 
existence, trying in various ways to fulfill 
the purposes for which they were establish- 
ed. The most of them are recent, and they 
are mainly important, in this account of 
progress, because of what they indicate rath- 
er than what they have yet accomplished. 
A few of the older ones have, however, al- 
ready had considerable influence, and all are 
ready for the coming century's work. 



V. 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF OUR MINERAL RESOURCES. 



TO write the story of the development 
of the mineral resources of the United 
States during the last century would de- 
maud a volume. The whole history of the 
new States and Territories beyond the val- 
ley of the Mississippi is little else than that 
of the opening and the working of their rich 
mines of gold and silver since 1849. But 
this region was not a part of the national 
territory at the time when our survey com- 
mences. While the Spaniards, greedy for 
that wealth which proved their ruin, plant- 
ed their colonies from Mexico to Chili aloug 
the western portion of the continent, rich 
in precious metals, our Euglish aucestors 
fixed their homes in a portion which, though 
not destitute of mineral resources, offered 
no tempting prizes to the miners of that 
early day. The records of our colonial peri- 
od have little to tell beyond the workiug of 
some iron ores along the sea-board, and at- 
tempts on a small scale to mine ores of cop- 
per and of lead. The first half century of 
our national existence does not add much 
to this record, and the history of the mar- 
velous developments in the working of the 
coal, petroleum, iron, and copper in our East- 
ern regions, and in the mining of gold and 
silver in the West, belongs to the present 
generation. 

It will be found convenient in our inquiry 
to follow, with a few exceptions, the geo- 
graphical division just indicated, and to 
Xjoint out for each of these regions separate- 
ly the general results already obtained in 
the development of its mineral wealth, con- 
sidering in the first place the territory 
which stretches from the eastern base of 
the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic. It 
is in this division of our territory that are 
found the great stores of coal and iron, be- 
sides vast supplies of petroleum, salt, cop- 
per, aud other minerals of less importance. 
Geologically described, this eastern half of 
the United States is essentially a great ba- 
sin of paleozoic strata nearly encircled with 
azoic crystalline rocks, and has been aptly 
described as a great bowl filled with miner- 



al treasure, the outer rim of which is form- 
ed by the mountains of Northern New York, 
the hills of New England, the Highlands 
of the Hudson, and their southward con- 
tinuation in the Blue Ridge nearly to the 
Gulf of Mexico. Thence, passing to the east- 
ern base of the Rocky Mountains, it extends 
northward, and by the Great Lakes around 
the northern rim of the bowl to the point 
of departure. Within the area thus inclosed 
lies the vast Appalachian coal-field, with its 
dependent areas of anthracite and semi-bi- 
tuminous coal, the lesser coal-fields of Mich- 
igan and Illinois, and the still more western 
one to which the coals of Iowa, Missouri, 
and Arkansas belong. It includes, more- 
over, formations containing petroleum, salt, 
and lead, besides much iron, though not less 
abundant stores of the latter metal are found 
in the surrounding crystalline rocks. 

The coal deposits of the great paleozoic 
basin furnish the mainspring of our princi- 
pal mechanical and commercial enterprises, 
the great source of motive power, and the 
chief means of reducing and manufacturing 
our iron. If to this we add that the value 
of the coal now mined in the United States 
is equal to that of all the iron, gold, and sil- 
ver produced in the country, we have said 
enough to justify us in assigning it the first 
place in a survey of our mineral resources. 
The forest growth supplied the demands for 
fuel of the early English colonists, to whom 
the treasures of the great basin were little 
known, and the first attempts at mining 
mineral fuel were in the coal-field near 
Richmond, Virginia, one of several small 
areas which lie over its eastern rim, or be- 
tween the Blue Ridge and the sea. This 
coal of Eastern Virginia occurs in what are 
known to geologists as mesozoic rocks, and 
belongs to a later age than the bituminous 
coal of Pennsylvania, which, however, it re- 
sembles in quality. It was probably first 
mined as early as 1750, and after the war 
of the Revolution was exported to Phila- 
delphia, New York, and Boston, until with- 
in the last thirty years. Other coals have 



186 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF OUR MINERAL RESOURCES. 



since replaced it in these markets, and it is 
now mined chiefly for local use. 

The anthracite of Eastern Pennsylvania 
was first discovered, it is said, in 1770. In 
1775, just a century since, a boat-load was 
taken down to the armory at Carlisle, and 
in 1791 the great open quarry of this fuel 
near Mauch Chunk was made known. From 
its unlikeness to the Virginia coal, and the 
difficulty of igniting it, the Pennsylvania 
anthracite encountered much opposition. 
Tradition tells us that a boat-load taken to 
Philadelphia in 1803 was broken up and 
used to mend the roads. But it slowly 
found its way into use ; and from a pam- 
phlet published in 1815 we learn that the 
coal from the Lehigh had been several years 
on trial in Philadelphia, where it had been 
compared with the Virginia bituminous 
coal, and, from the testimony of iron-work- 
ers, distillers, and others, was to be pre- 
ferred to it for durability and economy. 
Oliver Evans had, moreover, at this time 
tried the anthracite with success under the 
boilers of his steam-engine, and had also 
insisted upon its advantages for domestic 
purposes. Notwithstanding these results, 
the new fuel found its way very slowly into 
use, and in 1822 the total production of the 
anthracite mines was estimated at 3720 
tons, against 48,000 tons of the coal from 
Richmond, Virginia, then its only rival. 
Fifty years later, or in 1872, the official re- 
turns give for the exportation of coal from 
the anthracite region not less than 19,000,000 
tons, besides about 2,500,000 tons for local 
consumption, while that of the Virginia coal- 
field for the same year is estimated at 62,000 
tons. The late Professor Silliman, who vis- 
ited the anthracite region in 1825, and pub- 
lished his report of it in the following year, 
was the first to appreciate the real value 
and importance of this deposit of fossil fuel, 
which he then spoke of as a great national 
trust. 

The small detached basins of the anthra- 
cite region have together an area of only 472 
miles ; but the immense aggregate thickness 
of the seams of coal, varying in different 
parts from fifty to one hundred feet, and es- 
timated at an average of seventy feet for 
the whole, makes this wonderful region of 
greater value than Western coal-fields whose 
extent is measured by many thousands of 



square miles. Mr. P. W. Shaeffer, who has 
calculated the cubic content of these an- 
thracite beds, estimates it to have been at 
the time when mining was commenced 
equal to 26,361,070,000 tons, from which one- 
half may be deducted for waste in mining 
and breaking for market, and for losses 
from faults and irregularities in the beds, 
giving of merchantable coal 13,180,535,000 
tons. If from this we subtract the amount 
produced by the mines from 1820 to 1870, 
estimated at 206,666,325 tons, we had still 
in store at the latter date a supply of 
25,000,000 tons a year, or more than the 
present rate of consumption, for 525 years. 
The large waste in mining this precious 
fuel is due in part to the difficulty in work- 
ing seams of unusual thickness, often in 
highly inclined positions. Moreover, the 
loss in breaking and dressing for the mar- 
ket, which demands the anthracite in regu- 
larly assorted sizes, is very great, and the 
waste from these two causes amounts to 
about one-third the entire contents of the 
veins, while in Great Britain the average 
loss in mining and marketing ordinary coals 
is not over one-fifth. The great value of 
our American anthracite is due in part to 
its peculiar qualities, its hardness, density, 
purity, and smokelessness, which render it 
pre-eminently fit for domestic purposes and 
for iron smelting ; but in part also to its 
geographical position. Its proximity to the 
Atlantic sea-board, which is almost destitute 
of coal, to our great cities and wealthy and 
populous districts, and, moreover, to some 
of the most important deposits of iron ore 
in the country, has already led to an im- 
mense development of mining in the an- 
thracite region. The New England States, 
Eastern New York, New Jersey, and East- 
ern Pennsylvania look to it for their chief 
supplies of fuel ; great systems of railways 
and canals have been called into existence 
by it; and a vast iron-producing industry 
has grown up, dependent upon the anthra- 
cite fields, which now furnish nearly one- 
half of all the coal mined in the United 
States. It results from the course of trade 
that large quantities of anthracite find 
their way westward by railways, canal- 
boats, and lake steamers, freights in that 
direction being very low at certain seasons 
of the year. Thus there were brought to 



APPALACHIAN COAL BASIN. 



187 



Buffalo in 1873 about three-quarters of a 
million of tons of anthracite, the greater 
part by railway, of which Chicago received 
over half a million, or nearly one-third of its 
entire coal supply. Smaller quantities of 
anthracite find their way down the Ohio 
River to Cincinnati and beyoud. 

The chief coal supply of the regions to 
the west of the meridian of Washington 
comes, however, from the great Appalachian 
basin, which, underlying much of the west- 
ern half of Pennsylvania aud of the eastern 
third of Ohio, West Virginia, and a part of 
Eastern Kentucky, stretches through East- 
ern Tennessee as far as Alabama, embracing 
an area of coal-bearing rocks estimated at 
nearly 58,000 square miles. Along the east- 
ern border of this vast field of bituminous 
coal there are in Pennsylvania and in Mary- 
land several small areas which furnish a 
semi-bituminous coal, intermediate in com- 
position, as in position, between it and the 
anthracite of the East, and now very large- 
ly mined. The best known of these outlying 
basins are the Blossburg, on the north, and 
the Cumberland, in Maryland, on the south ; 
but there are between these other similar 
areas of considerable importance, such as 
the Broad Top, Johnstown, Towanda, and 
Ralston, the production of the whole being 
about 5,000,000 tons of coal annually, of 
which nearly one-half comes from the Cum- 
berland and about one-fifth from the Bloss- 
burg. This latter was first opened by a 
railway in 1840, while an outlet from the 
Cumberland field to the sea-board was es- 
tablished by the Baltimore and Ohio Rail- 
road in 1842, thus bringing for the first time 
the bituminous coal of the interior to tide- 
water, and displacing in Eastern markets 
the coal of Virginia. These semi-bitumi- 
nous coals, very rich in carbon, and yet pos- 
sessing the property of coking in the fire, 
are much esteemed for iron-working and for 
generating steam, for which they are large- 
ly used on our railways and ocean steamers, 
besides which great quantities are convert- 
ed into coke for iron smelting. These valu- 
able coals, like the anthracite, are confined 
to small areas, and will be exhausted in a 
few years, or at most a few generations. 
The Cumberland basin, at its present rate 
of working, will not last thirty years, and 
the time is not far distant when both the 



anthracite and the semi-bituminous coals 
of Pennsylvania will become augmented in 
price from their rarity. Its geographical 
position has led us to mine and consume 
first the most valuable portion of our coal, 
which, under different circumstances, it 
would have been wise to have replaced in 
part by other and more abundant varieties. 

In this connectiou it should be mentioned 
that on the southeastern border of the Ap- 
palachian coal-field, in Montgomery County, 
Virginia, are found small deposits of semi- 
bituminous and anthracite coals, both of 
good quality, which were mined to a con- 
siderable extent during the late civil war. 
Another area of anthracite demands our no- 
tice, which, like the coal of Richmond, Vir- 
ginia, is outside of the great basin. It is 
situated in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, 
where it occupies an area estimated at uot 
less than 500 square miles, and includes, in 
various parts already explored, beds of an- 
thracite from ten to twenty feet in thick- 
ness. This coal-field was discovered in 1760, 
and attempts at working it were made as 
early as 1808. The geological peculiarities 
of the region, the somewhat broken con- 
dition of the coal, and, above all, the com- 
petition of the anthracite of Pennsylvania, 
have retarded its development, so that the 
total production was estimated in 1872 at 
14,000 tons, being from a single mine at 
Portsmouth, Rhode Island, where this coal 
is employed for copper smelting. There is 
no doubt that this important field of an- 
thracite will one day be found of great val- 
ue to New England. 

The supplies of true bituminous coal 
which are found in the great Appalachian 
field are practically inexhaustible, and the 
mining of it is rapidly assuming propor- 
tions second only to those of the regions 
along its eastern border, which it is des- 
tined before long to surpass in its produc- 
tion. The bituminous coals may be divided 
into three classes, close-burning or coking 
coals, free-burning splint or block coals, and 
cannel. Of these the former are the most 
abundant, and for the greater number of 
purposes are used in their raw state. Un- 
like the anthracite, however, they are not 
fitted for iron smelting and for many other 
metallurgical operations unless previously 
converted into coke, for the production of 



IKS 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF OUR MINERAL RESOURCES. 



■which they are not all equally adapted. 
While some are too sulphurous, others con- 
tain too much ash, are too poor in fixed car- 
hou, or yield a coke deficient in weight and 
in solidity. In view of all these circum- 
stances, the value of a superior coking coal 
is very great, and a striking example of 
this appears in the Pittsburg seam, as it is 
called, of Western Pennsylvania. This re- 
markable coal seam, to the south of the city 
whose name it bears, attains near Connels- 
ville an unusual thickness, and yields a 
coke of unsurpassed quality, which is not 
only the foundation of the iron-smelting in- 
dustry of the western part of the State, but 
finds its way in large quantities to Cleve- 
land, Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, and 
even as far as Utah, where it is used to 
smelt the silver-lead ores of that region. 

Pittsburg is at present the great centre 
of the Western coal trade, and in addition 
to the large amount consumed in its own 
manufactures, distributes coal iu various 
directions by railway and river, sending vast 
quantities down the Ohio to supply the 
cities on its banks, and even to the Lower 
Mississippi. The amount of coal received 
at Pittsburg in 1872, in great part by the 
Monongahela, was over 115,000,000 bushels, 
which, at twenty-eight bushels to the ton, 
is considerably over 4,000,000 tons, and the 
annual increase for three years up to that 
time was at the rate of thirty-five per cent. 
To this we must add the amount of coke re- 
ceived, which doubled annually for the same 
three years, and equaled in 1872 nearly 
44,000,000 bushels, the product from coking 
about 2,600,000 tons of coal. The total esti- 
mated production of bituminous coal for 
Pennsylvania in 1872 (including about 
3,000,000 tons of semi -bituminous) was 
10,442,000 tons, and if to this we add the 
21,500,000 tons of anthracite, we shall find 
that this State alone furnished in that year 
more than two-thirds of all the coal mined 
in the United States. The figures from offi- 
cial sources fail to give the full amount of 
coal used for local consumption, but the en- 
tire production of the United States for 
1873 is estimated by Macfarlane at not less 
than 50,000,000 tons. The check which all 
our industries, and especially the working 
of coal and iron, sustained throughout the 
year 1874 has produced a temporary fall- 



ing off in production, so that the figures for 
1872 and 1873 are really a fairer index of 
our progress than those of a later date. 

Next in importance to that of Pennsylva- 
nia is the coal production of Ohio, which was 
estimated in 1872 at 4,400,000 tons. Owing 
to the want of proper railway communica- 
tions the coal deposits of this State have as 
yet been but little worked. It is in Ohio 
that the free-burning splint or block coal 
(which appears to a limited extent in the 
Chenango Valley, on the western frontier 
of Pennsylvania) finds its greatest develop- 
ment. This coal, which is extensively mined 
in the adjacent parts of Ohio, chiefly in the 
valley of the Mahoning, is prized not only 
on account of its freedom from ash and sul- 
phur, but from the fact that it can be di- 
rectly used iu the blast-furnace for smelting 
iron ores without previous coking, and it 
has given rise to an important iron indus- 
try in its vicinity. The supply in North- 
ern Ohio is, however, limited, and it is rap- 
idly becoming exhausted. A much more 
abundant deposit of a similar coal, under 
very favorable conditions for mining, has 
lately been made known farther southward 
in the State, in the Hocking Valley, where 
it is, moreover, accompanied by large beds 
of coking coal. The coal of Ohio is destined 
from its geographical position to become of 
great importance : lying on the northwest 
border of the Appalachian field, as the an- 
thracite and semi-bituminous coals of Penn- 
sylvania do upon its northeast border, it has 
to the north and west of it a vast, wealthy, 
and populous region, with growing indus- 
tries, and demanding large and increasing 
supplies of coal. 

The extension southward of the Appala- 
chian coal-field through West Virginia and 
parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama 
is known to abound in valuable beds of bi- 
tuminous coal, which have lately attracted 
considerable attention. Since the opening 
of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad the 
coals from the valley of the Kanawha are 
finding their way, to some extent, to the sea- 
board and into Eastern markets, but with 
this exception the vast coal deposits of this 
great Southern region are as yet mined only 
to supply the limited local demands. 

Among the important uses of bituminous 
coal is the manufacture of illuminating gas, 



WESTERN COAL FIELDS. 



189 



for which purpose immense quantities of 
coal are distilled. The annual consumption 
for this purpose in the cities of New York 
and Brooklyn is estimated at about 400,000 
tons. Those coals which yield large quan- 
tities of pure gas of high illuminating pow- 
er are greatly prized. The Eastern cities 
are in part furnished with gas coal from 
Cape Breton, but the greater part of the 
coals for this purpose is got from Western 
Pennsylvania. Excellent gas coals are, how- 
ever, obtained in Ohio and in West Virginia. 

The State of Michigan includes a coal ba- 
sin with an area of not less than 6700 square 
miles, but the beds of coal which it contains 
are few, thin, and of inferior quality. For 
this reason, and from the fact that the State 
is cheaply supplied with superior coals from 
Pennsylvania and Ohio, the coal of Michi- 
gan is worked only to a small extent for lo- 
cal consumption, the estimated production 
for 1872 being but 30,000 tons. The Illinois 
coal basin, which underlies the greater part 
of that State, and extends into the western 
parts of Indiana and Kentucky, has an area 
of not less than 47,000 square miles. Along 
its eastern and western borders in Clay 
County, Indiana, and near St. Louis, are 
found deposits of an excellent block coal 
like that of Ohio, adapted for iron smelting ; 
but with this exception the coals of this 
great basin are generally sulphurous and in- 
ferior in quality, and command in the mar- 
ket of Chicago a price much below those of 
Pennsylvania and Ohio. Chicago received 
in 1873 over 1,600,000 tons of coal, of which 
about two-fifths only were from the adja- 
cent coal-field, the remainder being brought 
from the two States just named. The first 
working of coal in Illinois dates from 1810, 
and the production of the State for 1872 
was equal to 3,000,000 tons, while Indiana 
furnished 800,000, and that portion of the 
coal-field which lies in Western Kentucky 
300,000 tons. 

The coals of the great field west of the 
Mississippi, which extends through Iowa, 
Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas, are mostly 
of inferior quality and in thin beds, but are 
of great local importance in these sparsely 
wooded regions. In the State of Arkan- 
sas, moreover, there is found a superior 
semi-bituminous coal, approaching to an- 
thracite in its character. Further west- 



ward, in the Rocky Mountains and thence 
to the Pacific coast, from the confines of 
Mexico to Canada, are extensive deposits of 
tertiary coals or lignites, which, though in- 
ferior in quality to the coals of the Appala- 
chiau basin, are, in the absence of better fuel, 
employed for generating steam and for do- 
mestic purposes. They are, however, very 
variable in quality, and some beds have of 
late been found which are fit for the manu- 
facture of illuminating gas, and are even ca- 
pable of yielding a coke suitable for met- 
allurgical processes. These coals are mined 
in Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming, and again 
on the Pacific coast in California, Oregon, 
and Washington Territory. Of the coal 
supply of San Francisco in 1873, which 
equaled 441,000 tons, about sixty per cent, 
came from these deposits along the western 
coast, the remainder being from Australia, 
England, and the Eastern States. 

The petroleum industry of the United 
States was in its beginning closely con- 
nected with coal, since it was the produc- 
tion of oils from bituminous coals which led 
the way to the utilization of the native min- 
eral oils. It had long been known that tar 
and oily matters could be extracted from 
coals and from shales impregnated with 
coaly matter by subjecting them to a high 
temperature, these substances, although not 
existing ready -formed in the coals, being 
generated by the decomposing action of 
heat. A product thus obtained was known 
to apothecaries more than a century ago by 
the name of British oil ; and in 1834 experi- 
ments on a large scale were made in France 
by Selligue to manufacture illuminating 
oils by the distillation of shales, with par- 
tial success. In 1846 similar results were 
obtained by Gesner in New Brunswick ; and 
in 1850 Atwood, of Boston, prepared a lubri- 
cating oil from coal-tar. At the same time 
Young, of Glasgow, was experimenting, and 
in 1850 introduced into the market, under 
the name of paraffine oil, a product from 
cannel-coal. The first works for this man- 
ufacture in the United States were estab- 
lished on Long Island in 1854, under Young's 
patents for manufacturing oils from the 
Boghead coal brought from Scotland, or 
from American coals. From this point the 
industry spread rapidly, and in 1855 and 
1856 works for the distillation of oils from 



190 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF OUR MINERAL RESOURCES. 



coals were erected in Kentucky, Ohio, and 
Pennsylvania, as well as along the Atlantic 
sea-board, where the principal material em- 
ployed was the mineral from Scotland just 
named. In January, 1860, there were in the 
United States not less than forty factories, 
the total daily production of which was 
about five hundred barrels, chiefly of burn- 
ing oil. This was sold in the market with 
the trade name of kerosene, or simply as 
coal oil ; and lamps suitable for burning it 
having been devised, it became widely used, i 
But this industry of the distillation of coal 
was destined to have a very short duration, 
for the oil wells of Pennsylvania, opened in 
1859, furnished in 1860 not less than 500,000 
barrels of petroleum — a production far ex- 
ceeding that of the coal distilleries. It was 
soon found that from this mineral oil prod- 
ucts could be extracted in all respects simi- 
lar to those from coal, and the result was 
that from this time the manufacture of coal 
oil was abandoned, and the works which had 
been erected for this purpose were changed 
to petroleum refineries. 

The early history of petroleum is curious. 
Known and employed for burning from re- 
mote antiquity in the Old World, no process 
for its purification had been devised, and it 
was therefore at best but an indifferent and 
cheaper substitute for animal and vegetable 
oils. The first attempts to refine it for com- 
mercial purposes are believed to have been 
made by Young, of Glasgow, in 1847, on pe- 
troleum got from Derbyshire, iu England, 
from which he prepared a lubricating oil, 
and it was the exhaustion of this supply 
which led him to improve the methods for 
the extraction of oils from coal. 

Meanwhile, in the United States, the ex- 
istence of sources of miueral oil had been 
known to the Indians of New York and 
Pennsylvania, who prized it as a medicine, 
for which purpose it became familiar to the 
early European colonists under the name of 
Seneca-oil. It appears to have been an ob- 
ject of research to the aborigines ages ago, 
since in the oil regions of Western Pennsyl- 
vania are found pits or wells apparently dug 
for the purpose of collecting the oil, careful- 
ly timbered, and affording from the growth 
of the forest upon the site evidences of an 
antiquity of from 500 to 1000 years. As early 
as 1819, in boring for brine on the Muskingum 



River, in Ohio, from a depth of 400 feet were 
obtained large quantities of mineral oil, 
which was a source of great annoyance to 
the salt-makers. At this time attempts were 
made to use the oil for illumination, but, from 
the want of proper lamps, it was not found to 
be adapted to the purpose. In 1854 the suc- 
cessful manufacture of oils from coal caused 
attention to be drawn to the possibility of 
utilizing these native oils, and the Penn- 
sylvania Oil Company was formed for the 
purpose of manufacturing the petroleum 
found at Oil Creek, in Venango County, 
Pennsylvania. The chemical investigation 
of the material was committed to Professor 
B. Silliman, Jun., and his report to the com- 
pany, which appeared in April, 1855, has 
been the point of departure for the immense 
industry of petroleum which has grown up 
within the last twenty years. In this re- 
port was described the conversion of the 
crude petroleum by fractional distillation 
into products differing in density and in vol- 
atility, the manufacture from it of a burn- 
ing oil of great illuminating power, of an 
oil capable of supporting a low temperature 
and fitted for lubrication, and also of paraf- 
fine. He farther showed the importance 
of distillation in a current of highly heat- 
ed steam, and noticed the breaking up of 
heavier into lighter oils by continued heat 
— processes which have since assumed a 
great importance in the manufacture of 
petroleum. 

Notwithstanding these remarkable re- 
sults, little was effected for some years ; the 
supply of petroleum was limited to that 
which could be gathered from the surface 
of the water in the locality, and from its 
cost it could not compete with the product 
of the distillation of coal. At length an at- 
tempt was made to repeat the early experi- 
ment of the Muskingum salt-works, aud a 
well was bored by Drake, the superintend- 
ent of the Pennsylvania Oil Company, from 
which, at a depth of seventy-two feet, a 
supply of oil amounting to ten barrels or 
400 gallons a day was obtained, which was 
sold for fifty-five cents a gallon. This was 
in August, 1859, and the successful trial was 
soon followed by many others not less so. 
The history of the wild excitement and 
speculation which followed this discovery, 
and the great accession of wealth to the re- 



PETROLEUM. 



191 



gion, is familiar to all. Wells were sunk 
which yielded from 100 to as much as 2000 
barrels of oil daily, often without the la- 
bor of pumping. Of oue well it is recorded 
that it afforded 450,000 barrels of oil in a 
little over two years, while another is said 
to have given not less than 500,000 barrels 
in a twelvemonth. Petroleum was soon 
discovered not only over a wide district in 
Pennsylvania, but in Eastern Ohio and in 
parts of West Virginia and Kentucky, and 
even in Indiana, as well as in Western Can- 
ada. In I860 the production rose to 500,000 
barrels of forty gallons each, and for the dec- 
ade ending with 1870 it amounted to not less 
than 35,273,000 barrels of crude oil. Of this 
by far the greater part came from Penn- 
sylvania, for of the 6,500,000 barrels pro- 
duced in 1870, not less than 5,569,000 were 
from that State, the production of about 
3000 wells, which is an average of only about 
five barrels daily for each well. 

The wells in Venango County, where this 
industry began, were generally from 600 to 
800 feet in depth, but with the partial ex- 
haustion of these the scene of operations 
has been removed to more southern dis- 
tricts, where the oil supplies are found at 
greater depths ; and the wells in Butler 
County, now the great seat of production, 
are from 1200 to 1500 feet deep. The crude 
oil is carried from the wells to the points 
of refining or of shipment through iron 
pipes. Some of these bines are fifteen and 
twenty miles in length, and one is in proc- 
ess of construction from Butler County to 
Pittsburg, a distance of about forty miles. 
It has even been proposed to convey the 
oil by a series of conduits and reservoirs 
across the mountains to Philadelphia. 

The processes for refining the crude pe- 
troleum and preparing from it various com- 
mercial products have been perfected by 
much chemical skill. The loss in refining 
amounts to about ten per cent., and the av- 
erage product of illuminating oil from the 
crude petroleum of Pennsylvania is about 
sixty-five per cent. The other products are 
dense lubricating oils, light naphthas, and 
paraffine or mineral wax, of which a barrel 
of crude cil yields about five pounds. 

The abundance of the Pennsylvania pe- 
troleum and the skillful manner in which 
it is refined have led to a general exporta- 



tion of these products to every part of the 
civilized world. Already in 1861 we find 
the shipments of petroleum from the Unit- 
ed States to foreign ports equal to nearly 
28,000 barrels of forty gallons each, and for 
the ten years ending with 1870 the expor- 
tation was 14,465,000 barrels. By far the 
greater part of this was shipped in the re- 
fined state, and its average price for the 
term of ten years was estimated at twenty- 
five cents a gallon, thus representing an ag- 
gregate value of over $144,000,000. The in- 
crease in the amount exported has been 
regular and constant. That for the calen- 
dar year 1870 was 3,495,800 barrels ; for 1872, 
3,754,060 ; for 1873, 5,937,041 ; and for 1874, 
5,878,578 barrels, of which about nine-tenths 
were refined oil. 

This large increase in the exports of 1873 
and 1874 shows the very considerable aug- 
mentation in production which has fol- 
lowed late discoveries of new and produc- 
tive oil districts in Pennsylvania. These 
have been attended by a great reduction in 
price. From fifty-five cents the gallon, at 
which the first crude oil from the wells was 
sold, it soon fell to twenty cents, and to six- 
ty or seventy cents for the refined oil. In 
1872 its price in New York had fallen below 
twenty-four cents, in 1873 to below nine- 
teen, and in 1874 to a small fraction over 
thirteen cents, the crude oil in New York 
having fallen in the same three years from 
about thirteen to less than six cents the 
gallon. Of crude oil forty-three and a half 
gallons are counted to a barrel, yet its price 
in Western Pennsylvania in 1874 was from 
sixty to seventy-five cents a barrel at the 
wells, and from eighty cents to a dollar at 
the delivery pipes. Even at the present re- 
duced prices the annual value of the petro- 
leum product of the country is very great. 
The export for 1874, chiefly of refined oil, 
at the mean price of 13.09 cents the gallon, 
equals .$30,825,268. The present annual con- 
sumption of the United States is estimated 
at 1,500,000 barrels of refined petroleum, 
which, added to the export for 1874, gives a 
total of 7,378,000 barrels of refined oil. The 
estimated production of crude oil for 1874 
was not less than 10,687,930 barrels, or 29,282 
daily. Already in 1870, when the produc- 
tion was considerably less than at pres- 
ent, it was said that the petroleum wells 



192 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF OUR MINERAL RESOURCES. 



of the United. States yielded in a week an 
amount of oil greater than the entire annu- 
al production of the whale-fisheries of New 
England at the time of their greatest pros- 
perity. American petroleum has now al- 
most entirely replaced the products of these 
fisheries, and furnished to the whole world 
a cheap and admirable means of illumina- 
tion. Petroleum abounds in many parts 
of the Old World, but attempts to compete 
with the product of Pennsylvania have not 
hitherto been very successful. The same 
remark will apply to the petroleum found 
in Santa Barbara County, California, which 
is refined there to a limited extent for do- 
mestic use, and yields, besides a good burn- 
ing oil, one peculiarly fitted for lubricating 
purposes. 

We now proceed to notice the history 
of the iron industry of the United States, 
which is as yet confined to the region east 
of the Rocky Mountains, and must be consid- 
ered in connection with the coal upon which 
it is to a great extent dependent. The great 
supplies of iron ores to the east of the Ap- 
palachian coal-field are, first, from the beds, 
chiefly of the magnetic species, but occa- 
sionally of red hematite, which abound in the 
Adirondack region of New York, extending 
northward into Canada (which furnishes a 
considerable quantity of ore to the Ameri- 
can market) ; while southward, in the mount- 
ain belt from the Highlands of the Hudson 
to South Carolina, are great deposits of sim- 
ilar ores, extensively mined in New York, 
New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Within the 
eastern rim of the basin and parallel with 
it is, in the second place, a belt of iron ores, 
chiefly brown hematite, which is traced 
from Vermont along the western border of 
New England, and assumes a great develop- 
ment in parts of Pennsylvania, Virginia, 
Tennessee, and Alabama. Further west- 
ward, within the great basin, are found the 
red fossiliferous ores which lie near the 
summit of the Silurian series, and are traced 
from Wisconsin eastward through Ontario 
and Central New York, and thence south- 
ward, parallel with the Alleghanies and in 
pioximity to the coal, through Pennsylva- 
nia, as far as Alabama. Besides these are 
to be considered the great deposits of iron 
ores belonging to the coal measures, in- 
cluding those of the lower carboniferous. 



These ores, which are carbonates and limon- 
ites, occasionally with red hematite, abound 
in Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West 
Virginia. They are wanting or rare in the 
middle and western coal-fields of the great 
basin ; but between these, in Missouri and 
Arkansas, there rise from the thinly spread 
out paleozoic strata mountains of crystal- 
line rocks, which include immense deposits 
of red hematite and magnetic ores of great 
value. Farther northward these crystal- 
line rocks, with their metallic treasures, are 
concealed beneath newer strata, but they 
re-appear, charged with great quantities of 
these same species of iron ore, in the north- 
ern peninsula of Michigan, whence, sweep- 
ing eastward through Canada, the chain 
of crystalline rocks bearing these ores is 
continued to the Adirondack region of 
New York. 

In the colonial period, and even during 
the first years of the republic, the smelting 
of iron ores was confined to the eastern rim 
of the great basin, and indeed the first fur- 
naces erected were for the reduction of the 
limonite ores which occur in small deposits 
along the Atlantic border and outside of 
the limits above defined. We find an at- 
tempt to make iron at Jamestown, in Vir- 
ginia, as early as 1619, and a little later a 
furnace was erected at Lynn, Massachu- 
setts. As early as 1717 pig-iron was export- 
ed from the colonies to England, and the 
increase of the iron industry excited the 
jealousy of the British iron manufacturers, 
so that in 1750 an act of Parliament forbade 
the erection of rolling or slitting mills in 
the colonies. Before the time of the Revo- 
lution we find numerous blast-furnaces from 
Virginia as far as Western Massachusetts, 
smelting the limonites, and in New Jersey 
and Pennsylvania the magnetic ores of these 
regions. 

A considerable portion of the iron of this 
early time was, however, made in bloom- 
ary furnaces, by means of which malleable 
iron is obtained directly from the ore, a 
method of no little interest in the history 
of our manufacture. A similar process be- 
longs to the infancy of the metallurgic art, 
and is still practiced among barbarous na- 
tions, where the mode of making pig-iron in 
the blast-furnace is unknown. A modifica- 
tion of this direct method survives in the 



ANTHRACITE FURNACES. 



193 



Catalan forge of Western Europe, and in 
the last century another form was known in 
Germany, where it is now forgotten. The 
German bloomary furnace found its way to 
America, and was employed in New Jersey 
and Pennsylvania at least as early as 1725. 
This furnace had the great advantage that 
its construction required but little skill and 
little outlay. A small water-fall for the 
blast and the hammer, a rude hearth with a 
chimney, and a supply of charcoal and ore, 
enabled the iron-worker to obtain, as occa- 
sion required, a few hundred pounds of iron 
in a day's time in a condition fitted for the 
use of the blacksmith, after which his prim- 
itive forge remained idle until there was a 
farther demand. To this day such furnaces 
are found in the mountains of North Caro- 
lina, and furnish the bar-iron required for 
the wants of the rural population. 

An interesting episode in the history 
of American iron manufacture is afforded 
by the attempts of the early explorers to 
utilize the black iron sand which is found 
at many points along our sea-board, from 
the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Capes of the 
Chesapeake, and early in the last century, 
under the name of the Virginia sand iron, 
was the subject of unsuccessful attempts to 
treat it for the extraction of iron. At length 
the Rev. Jared Eliot, of Killihgworth, Con- 
necticut, grandson of John Eliot, the apos- 
tle of the Indians, after many experiments 
on the iron sand which is found in consid- 
erable quantities on the south coast of that 
State, succeeded by the aid of the German 
bloomary in resolving the problem, and made 
blooms of malleable iron of fifty pounds 
weight, for which discovery he was in 1761 
awarded a medal by the Society of Arts of 
London. He informs us that his son had, 
moreover, been able to convert this iron into 
steel of superior quality, and would have es- 
tablished a manufactory of it but for the 
act of Parliament passed at that time pro- 
hibiting the production of steel in the col- 
onies. It is curious to see this forgotten 
discovery brought up again in our day, and 
applied to these sands on the southern shore 
of Long Island, and more successfully at 
Moisie, in the Lower St. Lawrence. Still 
more worthy of note is it that this prim- 
itive bloomary furnace, discarded in Eu- 
rope, has been improved by American in- 
13 



genuity, enlarged, fitted with a hot blast, 
water tuyeres, and other modern appliances, 
so that in the hands of skilled workmen in 
Northern New York it affords for certain 
ores an economical mode of making a supe- 
rior malleable iron, of which about 50,000 
tons are thus produced yearly. A large 
part of this product is consumed at Pitts- 
burg for the manufacture of cutlery steel 
of excellent quality. 

The first half century of the republic saw 
but little progress in the manufacture of 
iron, and the total amount produced in 1810 
is estimated at only 54,000 tons, which is not 
equal to the present annual yield of four or 
five of our modern blast-furnaces. During 
this period charcoal was the only fuel em- 
ployed, and the first great step in our iron 
manufacture was the use of anthracite. At- 
tempts were made to employ a mixture of 
this fuel with charcoal at Mauch Chunk, 
Pennsylvania, in 1820, aud at Kingston, Mas- 
sachusetts, with the anthracite of Rhode 
Island, in 1827, but the way to the solution 
of the problem was finally prepared by the 
introduction of the hot blast in 1831, and in 
1833 a patent was granted in the United 
States for the smelting of iron with anthra- 
cite by the aid of a blast of heated air. The 
first successful attempt to use anthracite 
alone in this country seems to have been in 
1838, near Mauch Chunk, with a furnace 
twenty-one and a half feet high, producing 
two tons of iron daily. From this the in- 
dustry spread, and in 1840 there were six 
furnaces employing this fuel, and making 
each from thirty to fifty tons weekly of pig- 
iron. To-day our anthracite furnaces are 
many of them sixty and even eighty feet in 
height, producing from 250 to 300 tons of 
iron in a week. Of 680 furnaces in the 
United States in 1873, 226 consumed an- 
thracite, and produced nearly one-half of 
all the pig-iron made. 

From its purity, hardness, and ability to 
resist the weight of the charge, this fuel 
is unrivaled for the purpose of iron smelt- 
ing. This coal supplies the furnaces of East- 
ern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and to a 
great extent those of Eastern New York and 
of Maryland ; but as we approach the cen- 
tral region of Pennsylvania its use is grad- 
ually replaced by that of charcoal and of 
coke from the semi-bituminous coals, while 



194 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF OUR MINERAL RESOURCES. 



further westward the coke of the true bitu- 
minous coals, of which that of Couuelsville 
is the type, is the principal fuel, until we 
reach the western border of the great Appa- 
lachian field, where, in Ohio, are found the 
free -burning splint or block coals, which 
can be used in the smelting furnace in the 
raw state either alone or with an admixture 
of coke. The ores of the coal measures of 
Southern Ohio, known as the Hanging Rock 
district, have hitherto been smelted with 
charcoal, which is now being replaced by 
the block coal of the region. Similar coals 
on the eastern and western borders of the 
Illinois coal-field are also used for iron 
smelting. 

The relations of the ore to the fuel are of 
great importance to the development of the 
iron industry. Thus of the ores of Lake Su- 
perior a small portion only is smelted with 
charcoal in the region, and by far the great- 
er part is brought southward by the lakes — 
some to Chicago to be smelted with the coal 
of Indiana, and much more to Cleveland, 
where it is met by the block coal of Ohio, 
and in still larger quantities is carried south- 
ward to the mines of this coal, chiefly in the 
Chenango and Mahoning valleys, or as far 
as Pittsburg, to be smelted with the coke 
of that region. In like manneT the rich 
ores of Missouri find their way to the block 
coals of Indiana, to Southeastern Ohio, and 
even to Pittsburg, filling the returning ves- 
sels which have gone down the Ohio River 
laden with coal. In the East the iron fur- 
naces consuming anthracite are not direct- 
ly in the coal region, but scattered through 
the eastern part of Pennsylvania, and the 
adjacent portions of Maryland, New Jer- 
sey, and New York, sometimes, moreover, at 
points more or less remote from the ore beds 
which supply them. In the valley of the 
Hudson the anthracite comes half-way to 
meet the rich ores of Lake Champlain, and 
even on the shores of this lake may be seen 
large blast-furnaces smelting the ores of the 
vicinity with the help of the anthracite 
brought as back freight by the vessels car- 
rying the supplies of ore southward. The 
ores from the crystalline rocks, on account 
of their greater richness, can support the 
cost of a longer freight than the poorer ores 
found within the paleozoic basin, and they 
have, moreover, the advantage in many cases 



of yielding a purer iron. The early manu- 
facturers of Bessemer steel in this country 
were under the necessity of bringing their 
supplies of pig-iron from Cumberland, in 
England, and ores have even been brought 
from Spain and Algeria to be smelted with 
anthracite for the manufacture of Bessemer 
pig metal. Recently, however, it has been 
found that by careful selection the crystal 
line ores from our Eastern regions may be 
made to yield a pig-iron suitable for this 
purpose, while the region beyond the Alle- 
ghanies gets its supply of Bessemer metal 
from the ores of Lake Superior or of Mis- 
souri. The iron ore shipped from the 
northern peninsula of Michigan in 1873 
amounted to 1,178,879 gross tons, in addi- 
tion to about 100,000 tons smelted in the 
region. This, at an average of sixty per 
cent, of metal, equals considerably more 
than one-fourth of the total iron product 
of the country. 

The history of the growth of the iron 
manufacture in the United States within 
the last fifty years exhibits a remarkable 
progress. From a production of 54,000 tons 
in 1810, it had become 165,000 tons in 1830, 
347,000 tons in 1840, and 600,000 tons in 1850, 
as near as can be estimated. In 1860, it had 
reached 919,870; in 1870, 1,865,000; and in 
1872, 2,880,070 tons ; while the diminished 
production of 1873, 2,695,434 tons, shows 
already the effect of the depression under 
which the iron interest of the country still 
suffers. Of the production of 1873, very 
nearly one-half was made in Pennsylvania, 
and not less than 1,249,673 tons with anthra- 
cite, while the total amount of charcoal- 
made pig-iron was only 524,127 tons, to which 
is to be added 50,000 tons of malleable iron 
made by the direct process in bloomaries. 
The importation of foreign iron and steel 
for 1872 was 795,655 tons ; for 1873, 371,164 
tons ; and for 1874, less than 200,000 tons. 
From the figures for 1872 and 1873 we may 
conclude that the consumption in the Unit- 
ed States was then equal to about 3,500,000 
tons of iron yearly. 

The great demand for iron in this coun- 
try for the purposes of railway construction, 
together with the high prices in Great Brit- 
ain in 1872 and 1873, led to a large increase 
in the number of blast-furnaces. In the 
two years just named eighty-three furnaces, 



COPPER MINES. 



195 



some of them among the largest in the conn- 
try, were finished and put into blast, and 
the whole number in operation in the au- 
tumn of 1873 was estimated at 636, hav- 
ing a capacity of producing not less than 
4,371,277 tons of pig-iron, while a later es- 
timate from the same source, the American 
Iron and Steel Association, gives in July, 
1874, a capacity of 4,500,000 tons, or about 
1,000,000 more than the greatest consump- 
tion yet reached. Even at the previous rate 
of increase, many years must elapse before 
the country can consume such an amount 
of iron, and with the general prostration of 
business, and especially of the iron trade, in 
1874, we are not surprised to find that a very 
large proportion of these furnaces is now 
out of blast, and that the selling price of 
pig-iron at the beginning of 1875 was below 
that at which it could be made at some of 
the furnaces. For the future the iron man- 
ufacturers of our country must strive for 
progress not only in the selection of ores 
and fuels, but in improvements in the con- 
struction and the management of furnaces, 
in all of which directions great economies 
remain to be effected, as the results obtain- 
ed in late years by the skill and high science 
of British iron-masters abundantly show. 
In this way we may hope before long to ri- 
val not only in quality but in cheapness the 
iron products of other countries. With the 
boundless resources of coal and iron which 
our country affords, it is only a question of 
how soon we can successfully contend with 
Great Britain in foreign markets. The en- 
tire iron production of the world was in 
1856 about 7,000,000 tons, and in 1874 it was 
estimated at 15,000,000 tons, of which, at 
both of these periods, about one-half was 
furnished by Great Britain. It is supposed 
by Mr. A. S. Hewitt that at the end of the 
century the demand will amount to not less 
than 25,000,000 tons. The present immense 
production is already taxing heavily the re- 
sources of England, which obtains a large 
proportion of its purer ores from foreign 
countries, and a period will soon be reached 
when she can no longer meet the world's 
increasing demand, for the supply of which 
no other country offers advantages com- 
parable with the United States. The day 
is therefore not far distant when, in the 
words of Mr. Hewitt, all rivalry between 



the two nations in iron production must 
pass away. 

So long as the business of iron smelting 
was prosperous, and the profits were, as has 
been the case for the past few years in most 
parts of the country, very large, considera- 
tions of economy in the production of iron 
were too much neglected, but for the future 
all this must be changed. It is probable 
that before long we shall see some of the 
old furnaces and furnace sites abandoned, 
and a transfer of capital and skilled labor 
from many of the present centres of produc- 
tion to points where iron can be made at 
lower rates. Questions of freight of the raw 
materials will be closely considered, and new 
fields will be sought where the associations 
of ores of iron with coal suitable for smelt- 
ing them will enable pig-iron to be pro- 
duced more cheaply than where both the 
ore and the fuel are brought from afar. In 
districts like Fayette County and the Johns- 
town and Broad Top coal-fields in Pennsyl- 
vania, and along the western outcrop of the 
great Appalachian coal-field in Eastern Ohio, 
where the characteristic iron ores of the coal 
measures are more abundant than farther 
eastward, and are accompanied with coals 
suitable for their reduction, these conditions 
for the cheap production of iron exist. While 
the ores thus found in proximity to the coal 
are adapted for the production of all the or- 
dinary qualities of iron, the increasing ex- 
port of coal from this western border to the 
regions northward and westward permits 
the bringing back at low rates of freight 
of the rich ores of Missouri and Michigan, 
which are adapted to the making of Besse- 
mer steel. The southward extension of this 
great coal-field into West Virginia, Eastern 
Kentucky and Tennessee, and Northern Ala- 
bama also offers great facilities for the cheap 
manufacture of iron from native ores, which 
will at no distant day be utilized. 

The copper mines of the United States 
next claim our attention. Throughout the 
crystalline rocks which form the eastern 
border of the paleozoic basin ores of this 
metal are pretty abundantly distributed, 
and are now mined and treated for the ex- 
traction of the copper in Vermont, Pennsyl- 
vania, North Carolina, and Eastern Tennes- 
see, besides which ores from other localities 
along this belt, and from various regions to 



196 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF OUR MINERAL RESOURCES. 



the westward of the great basin, are brought 
to Baltimore and to the vicinity of Boston 
for reduction. The total production from all 
these sources, which has never been greater 
than at present, is, however, estimated at 
less than 2500 tons — an amount inconsider- 
able when compared with the production 
of the mines of Lake Superior. In these, 
unlike the mines just mentioned, and, in- 
deed, unlike most others in the world, the 
copper, instead of being in the condition of 
an ore — that is to say, mineralized and dis- 
guised by combination with sulphur or with 
oxygen and other bodies, from which it must 
be separated by long and costly chemical 
processes — is found in the state of pure met- 
al, and needs only to be mechanically sepa- 
rated from the accompanying rocky matters 
previous to melting into ingot copper. The 
history of the copper region on the south 
shore of Lake Superior is famous in the an- 
nals of American mining. The metal, which 
in many cases is found in masses of all sizes 
u]} to many tons in weight, was known and 
used by the aboriginal races, and the traces 
of their rude mining operations are still met 
with. The first modern attempts at extract- 
ing this native copper, in 1771, were unsuc- 
cessful, and it was not until 1843 that the 
attention of mining adventurers was again 
turned toward this region. Numerous mines 
were opened, and a period of reckless specu- 
lation followed, which ended, in 1847, in the 
failure and abandonment of nearly all the 
enterprises which had been begun. They 
were, however, soon resumed under wiser 
management, and have been followed up 
with remarkable success. At first the op- 
erations were chiefly directed to the ex- 
traction of the great masses of native cop- 
per which were found distributed in an ir- 
regular manner in veins or fissures in the 
rocks, and yielded in some cases large prof- 
its ; but with the exhaustion of these a more 
abundant and regular source of supply has 
been found in layers of a soft earthy mate- 
rial, known as ash beds, containing metallic 
copper finely disseminated, or in beds of a 
conglomerate of which pure copper forms 
the cementing material. The successful 
working of these two kinds of deposits has 
been arrived at only by well-directed skill 
in management, and by mechanical appli- 
ances which diminish the costs of mining, 



crushing, and washing the rock, and reduce 
to a minimum the inevitable loss of copper 
in the waste material. No mining industry 
illustrates more strikingly than this the im- 
portance of such economies. A rock which 
may be made to yield one part in a hundred 
of metallic copper can, under favorable con- 
ditions, be treated with profit, and the res- 
idue in such a case may still contain one- 
half as much more copper, which is lost. A 
mine in this region a few years since yield- 
ed annually, from the treatment of 1,200,000 
tons of rock, 800 tons of metallic copper, be- 
ing at the rate of two-thirds of one per cent., 
and this amount, at the price of copper then 
prevailing, was just sufficient to pay all the 
costs of extraction. The residues showed 
by assay the presence, in a finely divided 
state, of as much more copper, and it is ev- 
ident that a greater perfection in the proc- 
ess of extraction, by which one-half of the 
copper thus lost could have been saved, 
would have yielded 400 tons additional, 
which, inasmuch as the costs of mining, 
crushing, and washing were already paid 
by the first 800 tons, would have been clear 
profit. One of the best-known mines in the 
region, which has been worked with con- 
tinued success since its opening, in 1849, 
produced, in 1872, 1138 tons of fine copper, 
to obtain which over 100,000 tons of rock 
were mined, and over 60,000 tons of this se- 
lected for stamping and washing, so that 
the copper yielded was only 1.12 per cent., 
yet the profits of the year's working were 
$200,000. It would be foreign to our plan 
to describe modes of treatment, but state- 
ments of results like this serve to show 
what may be obtained by the application 
of skill and science to mining industry. At 
the Calumet and Hecla mine, the most re- 
markable one of the Lake Superior region, 
from 700 to 800 tons of rock are now treated 
daily, and yield about four per cent, of me- 
tallic copper, which, when converted into 
ingots, costs about thirteen cents the pound 
— a price far below that at which it can bo 
extracted from the less rich deposits of the 
region or from the ores of the metal by the 
ordinary process of smelting. This mine 
produced of ingot copper, in 1872, 9717 tons, 
and in 1874, 9918 tons, of 2000 pounds. The 
crude copper from these mines, as delivered 
to the refiners, who melt it into ingots, yields 



GOLD AND SILVER. 



197 



on an average about eighty per cent, of met- 
al — a fact to be borne in mind in consulting 
the statements of production, which are gen- 
erally given for the unrefined product. The 
amount of copper yielded by the Lake Supe- 
rior region from its opening, in 1845, to 1858 
is estimated at 18,000 tons. From about 
4100 tons in the latter year the production 
has shown a progressive increase, with some 
slight fluctuations, to the present time. It 
equaled, for 1873, 18,514 tons, and for 1874 
not less than 22,235 tons, making an aggre- 
gate for the past thirty years of 217,134 tons, 
which at eighty per cent, equals 173,704 tons 
of ingot copper. The total yield of ingot 
copper for the lake region in 1874 is esti- 
mated by Caswell at 17,327 tons, to which he 
adds for the production from the ores of the 
metal 2375 tons, making a total production 
for the United States of 19,702 tons of cop- 
per. This exceeds considerably the domes- 
tic consumption, and accordingly we find 
that there were exported in 1874 not less 
than 4500 tons of copper. The supply of 
native copper from the mines of the lake 
region will probably continue to increase, 
and in years to come the working of the 
great deposits of copper ores which abound 
both in the Eastern and Western portions 
of our country will add largely to the pro- 
duction, so that henceforth the United States 
is destined to furnish considerable quanti- 
ties of copper to foreign markets. The price 
of this metal is subject to remarkable fluc- 
tuations. Thus from fifty-five cents the 
pound iu 1864 it gradually fell to nineteen 
in 1870, rising again to forty-five cents in 
1872, and, falling once more to nineteen in 
the summer of 1874, rose to twenty-four cents 
at the close of the year. 

It yet remains to speak of our mines of 
gold and silver. Although gold is distrib- 
uted in greater or less quantity throughout 
the mountain ranges which form the east- 
ern rim of the great basin, its presence was 
not made known till 1799, when it was discov- 
ered in the soil in Cabarrus County, North 
Carolina. For the next twenty-five years 
small quantities of gold were gathered by 
washing from the earth at various points 
from the Potomac to Alabama ; but it was 
not until 1825 that the precious metal was 
found in veins of quartz both in North Car- 
olina and Virginia. The whole amount of 



gold got from this Southern region up to 
1827 is estimated at only $110,000 ; but with 
the opening of the gold-bearing veins a 
rapid increase in production took place, and 
in 1837 branch mints were established by 
the government in North Carolina and in 
Georgia, where they existed up to the t iine 
of the late civil war ; before which, howev- 
er, the gold production of the region had 
greatly fallen off, these mines having been 
deserted for the richer ones of the western 
coast. The whole amount of gold from this 
region for three-quarters of a century up to 
1873 is estimated at about $20,000,000 ; but 
for the last year mentioned it amounted 
only to $100,000, the chief part of which was 
from North Carolina. 

The great supply of precious metals has 
come from the Avestern half of our territory. 
The vast region from the eastern base of 
the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific presents 
geographical features very different from 
those of the great Eastern paleozoic basin. 
Its numerous nearly parallel mountain 
ranges, to which the collective name of the 
Cordilleras has been applied, are rich in 
mineral treasures, which, as pointed out 
by Blake and by King, may be described 
as arranged in parallel zones, coinciding 
with the mountain belts. Along the Pa- 
cific coast range are deposits of quicksil- 
ver, tin, and chrome, while the belt of the 
Sierra Nevada and the Cascades carries a 
range of copper mines near its base, aud a 
line of gold-bearing veins and gold alluvions 
on its western flank. Along the eastern 
slope of the Sierra lies a zone of silver 
mines stretching into Mexico, and including 
the great Comstock lode of Nevada, while 
silver ores abound in the subordinate ranges 
between the Sierra and the Wahsatch. The 
silver-lead ores of New Mexico, Utah, and 
Western Montana, and the still more east- 
ern gold deposits of New Mexico, Colorado, 
Wyoming, and Montana, follow the same 
general law of distribution. We can, with- 
in our present limits, do little more than 
note some of the principal points in the his- 
tory of the opening of these mining regions, 
and give some figures which serve to show 
the vast mineral wealth of the Cordilleras. 

The gold of California was noticed by 
early Spanish explorers, and was again dis- 
covered on the Colorado River, just a centu- 



198 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF OUK MINERAL RESOURCES. 



y 



ry since, in 1775, but attracted no attention 
till its rediscovery early in 1848, when the 
existence of very rich gold alluvions was 
made known. A rapid immigration to the 
region at once followed, and it was re- 
ported in August of that year that the 
daily production of gold was from $30,000 
to $50,000. It was not until 1851 that the 
gold-bearing veins were discovered, and 
the larger part of the gold of California has 
been got from the placers,, as the alluvions 
are called. It is from the partial exhaust- 
ion of these that the production has of late 
years considerably diminished. In 1848 it 
was estimated at $10,000,000, and reached 
its maximum of $65,000,000 in 1853. In 
1870 it had fallen to $25,000,000, and reached 
$19,000,000 in 1873, but rose again in 1874 to 
$20,300,000. The total yield, since the open- 
ing of the mines in 1848, amounts to more 
than $1,000,000,000. The working of the 
gold-bearing veins and of the deeper allu- 
vions or placers has of late been systema- 
tized and greatly improved, and from the 
abundance and richness of these, and the 
persistence of the veins in depth, this re- 
gion may be expected to produce great 
amounts of gold for generations to come. 

From California explorations were soon 
carried both northward and eastward, and 
in addition to the gold of Oregon, Idaho 
and Washington Territories, the vast silver 
deposits of Nevada were made known. It 
was in 1859 that silver ore was first discov- 
ered on what has since been known as the 
Comstock lode — a vein which, viewed in the 
light of recent developments, is one of the 
most remarkable known in the history of 
mining. This lode, of great breadth, has 
been traced for a length of over five miles, 
and worked for more than four miles, in 
some places to a depth of 1500- feet. The 
ore has not been rich, seldom yielding over 
fifty dollars to the ton, and often less than 
one-half that amount, yet such has been its 
abundance that the production of the vein 
from its first working, in 1860, up to 1868 was 
$81,500,000, and up to the close of 1874 it had 
yielded a total amount of about $180,000,000, 
with very large profits to the miners. The 
bullion extracted from these ores contains 
an amount of gold equal to about one-third 
of the entire value. Other silver producing 
districts, second only in importance to that 



of Virginia City, which is the site of tho 
Comstock lode, have since been discovered 
in Nevada, and the value of the bullion 
from the State in 1872 amounted to not les3 
than $25,000,000, of which $13,500,000 were 
from this lode. For the calendar year 1873 
it equaled $31,666,000, of which $21,756,000 
were from Virginia City ; and the returns 
for the first half of 1874 showed a still in- 
creasing production. During the latter 
months of that year remarkable discov- 
eries were announced in the Comstock lode, 
which surpassed all previous developments 
in that region. An enormous mass of ore, 
in great part below a depth of 1500 feet, 
was exposed, far richer than any thing 
hitherto found in the lode, and said to 
yield an average of many hundred dollars 
to the ton. Some of the published esti- 
mates of the value of this discovery were 
probably exaggerated, but there seems lit- 
tle doubt that the amount of treasure re- 
vealed exceeded the whole production of 
the lode up to that time. 

The existence of silver-bearing lead ores 
in Utah was known as early as 1863, but 
the first attempt to develop them was 
made in 1870, when a few thousand tons of 
ore were shipped from the Emma mine 
eastward over the Union Pacific Railroad. 
In 1872, however, the production of this 
region had reached a value of $3,250,000; 
in 1873, of $3,750,000; and in 1874, very 
nearly $6,000,000. The ores are in great 
abundance, but are often not rich enough 
to support the cost of transportation, while, 
on the other hand, the rarity and high price 
of fuel render their treatment on the spot 
very costly. The average value of the ores 
exported, chiefly to the eastern and west- 
ern sea-boards, in 1873 was $115 a ton, be- 
sides which a large quantity was reduced 
in the region, yielding what is called base 
bullion, that is, lead carrying silver and 
some gold, and valued at from $200 to 
$250, the lead being there estimated at 
about $50 the ton. In some establishments 
in Utah the precious metals are extracted 
from the lead before shipment. The fuel 
there used is in part charcoal and in part 
coke sent from Pennsylvania. The lead 
furnished to the United States markets 
from the silver-lead ores of Utah and Ne- 
vada in 1874 is estimated at 26,000 tons, 



THE GOLD SUPPLY. 



199 



while the lead production of Missouri was 
15,000, aud that of Iowa, Illinois, and Wis- 
consin only 5500 tons. 

The silver production of the United 
States was altogether insignificant until 
18G1, when the Comstock lode gave $2,000,000 
of silver, since which time there has been a 
steady increase to $36,500,000 in 1873, giving 
a total production of $189,000,000. It is 
probable that for some years to come the 
supply of silver from the mines of the Cor- 
dilleras will be much greater than in the 
past. Already within the last four years 
the immense production of silver in this 
country has considerably reduced its price 
in the markets of the world, and the effect 
of recent discoveries can not fail to be a 
still farther depreciation of its value. 

The history of the mining of our gold and 
silver would be imperfect without a notice 
of the quicksilver of California, as it is by 
its aid that nearly the whole of these pre- 
cious metals, with the exception of the sil- 
ver of the lead ores, is extracted. Quick- 
silver ore was discovered in California as 
early as 1849, and the mines opened soon 
after have not only continued to supply the 
wants of the immense gold and silver indus- 
try of the West, but since 1852 have furnish- 
ed large quantities for exportation to Mex- 
ico, South America, China, and Australia. 
This amounted in 1865 to 44,000 flasks of 
seventy- six and a half pounds each, or 
3,366,000 pounds of quicksilver. The in- 
creased demand for this metal for the treat- 
ment of our silver ores, and the diminished 
production of the mines, have since reduced 
considerably the exportation. In no other 
region of the globe, however, is the ore of 
quicksilver so widely distributed as in Cali- 
fornia, and there is reason to believe that 
from the opening and working of new de- 
posits the production will soon be much 
increased — a result which will bo stimula- 
ted by the present high price of quicksilver 
and its scarcity in foreign markets. 

We have noticed the falling off in the 
yield of gold from California which began 



in 1853. It was not until 1860 that sup- 
plies of this metal from other districts ap- 
peared, rising from $1,000,000 in that year 
to $28,000,000 in 1866, since which time there 
has been a gradual falling off from these also, 
so that while for 1873 the gold of California 
equaled $19,000,000, that from other sources 
in the Western United States was $17,000,000, 
making a production of $36,000,000, that 
of the entire world being estimated at 
$100,000,000. Dr. R. W. Raymond, to whom 
we are indebted for these figures, gives the 
entire gold product of the country from 1847 
to 1873 inclusive at $1,240,750,000 ; and if to 
that we add his calculation of the silver pro- 
duced up to that date, equal to $189,000,000, 
we shall have $1,429,750,000. Adding to this 
the figures for 1874, which exceed a little 
those of 1873, we have a grand total of over 
$1,500,000,000 of gold and silver as the pro- 
duction of the territory between the eastern 
base of the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific 
since the opening of the mines of California 
in 1847. 

There are many mineral resources in the 
United States besides those already men- 
tioned which might justly claim a place iu 
a sketch like the present. Among them are 
the ores of chrome, zinc, lead, and nickel, 
now extensively mined; the extensive salt 
deposits in New York, Michigan, Pennsylva- 
nia, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia, which 
now supply to a great extent the markets 
of the country ; the mineral phosphates of 
the vicinity of Charleston, South Carolina, 
which are not only manufactured into fer- 
tilizers for domestic consumption, but large- 
ly exported to Great Britain ; and the gran- 
ites, marbles, sandstones, roofing slates, and 
other materials of construction, which are 
now the objects of large and profitable in- 
dustries. We have, however, selected, in 
preference to any of these, coal, petroleum, 
iron, copper, silver, and gold, which, from 
their great pecuniary value and their di- 
rect connection with material progress, have 
been among the most important elements in 
our national growth and prosperity. 



VI 

COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT. 



WHOEVER desires to understand the 
commerce of this and other lands, 
and to perceive its true order and mean- 
ing, must first consider what words stand 
for — what commerce and manufactures real- 
ly are in their simplest form. One to whom 
the word "manufactures" hriugs only the 
conception of vast factories for the working 
of cotton, wool, or iron has but the faint- 
est idea of what constitute the true man- 
ufactures of the nation; and one to whom 
the word " commerce" brings up only the 
image of an ocean steam-ship laden with 
goods and wares from distant ports, or a 
train of cars drawn by a powerful engine 
bearing many tons of merchandise to far- 
away places, has an equally faint impres- 
sion of the vast scope even of our inland 
traffic. 

Commerce is an occupation in which men 
serve each other ; it is an exchange in 
which both parties in the transaction gain 
something which they desire more than the 
thing they part with. It may sometimes be 
that the desire which is satisfied on the one 
part or the other is one that had better not 
be served : that is a question of morals with 
which we are not now dealing. Such ex- 
changes are, however, the exception. The 
traffic in commodities that work permanent 
injury constitutes but an insignificant pro- 
portion of the vast exchanges of the world; 
true commerce in useful things lies at the 
very foundation of human welfare. Unless 
a good and wholesome subsistence is possi- 
ble there can be neither spiritual, intellect- 
ual, nor aesthetic culture, and such a subsist- 
ence is only possible to the mass of men by 
means of an exchange of products. All com- 
merce is the aggregate of small transactions. 
The milkman who brings the daily portion 
of milk to him who dwells in city or town 
represents a commerce of vast proportion, 
almost equal in this country, in its aggre- 
gate value, to the whole sum of our foreign 
importations. The value of dairy products 
consumed in the United States or exported 
in the form of cheese and butter is more 



than four hundred million dollars. The 
milkman is the representative of one of the 
branches of commerce which has grown to 
this vast proportion during the century, and 
in which the people of the United States 
have shown the greatest originality. The 
cheese factory represents a manufacture 
born of thrift and enterprise only, and our 
exports of cheese exceed ninety million 
pounds a year. 

How little the true function of commerce 
has been understood may be proved by the 
fact that only within the century has it 
been admitted among English-speaking peo- 
ple that there can be any mutual service in 
the matter. In this country even to this 
day this truth is but obscurely perceived, 
and hence the nation with which we have 
our largest transactions, our mother coun- 
try, is often called our natural enemy by 
otherwise intelligent persons, because she 
tries to supply some of our needs at a low 
cost to us ; yet had the true nature of com- 
merce been comprehended a hundred years 
ago, war betweeu us and England would 
have been as impossible then as it would 
now be infamous and absurd. It was a 
want of knowledge as to the true function 
of trade that caused the Revolution. 

The year 1776 witnessed the publication 
of two documents of very great importance 
to the welfare of humanity, one of a purely 
public character — the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence of the United States of America ; 
the other, the work of a single man, a poor 
Scotch professor, a treatise on the causes of 
the wealth of nations, by Adam Smith. It 
may be affirmed almost with certainty that 
had the book been printed fifty years ear- 
lier, the Declaration of Independence would 
never have been issued, because the wrongs 
which made it necessary would have been 
remedied without resort to war. Had the 
simple principle, of mutuality of service been 
accepted, had it only become a part of the 
common knowledge of the English and the 
colonists that all commerce, whether among 
the people of the same state or between dif- 



ADAM SMITH'S " WEALTH OF NATIONS." 



201 



ferent states and nations, only exists and can 
only be maintained because it is profitable 
and beneficial to both parties, no English 
ministry could have been supported in the 
measures which were undertaken to prevent 
the establishment of manufactures and to 
restrict the commerce of America. It was 
the enforcement of these measures through 
a long series of years that gradually sapped 
the allegiance of the people of America, and 
finally led to the violent resistance of acts 
of minor importance, which in themselves 
would have been insufficient to provoke re- 
bellion. The colonists were ready to pay 
money, but resisted the perversion of the 
power of taxation. 

Viewed from a commercial stand-point, 
the war of the Revolution, therefore, was a 
terrible blunder, caused by a series of erro- 
neous theories as to the true nature and 
function of trade on the part of the English 
statesmen who had controlled the govern- 
ment of Great Britain during the previous 
century. 

They were imbued with the false idea 
that in commerco what one nation gained 
another must lose, and their policy in deal- 
ing with their colonies was controlled by 
the same false assumption. Their great 
navigators had been many of them only 
buccaneers under another name, their mer- 
chants and ship-owners fouud no infamy in 
the slave-trade, and their conquests in the 
East had begun in motives of personal and 
selfish aggrandizement. Throughout their 
history it had become apparent only to a 
few obscure students or to one or two en- 
lightened merchants that there could be 
greater gain in liberty than in restriction 
or slavery. How much of the true spirit 
of liberty our Puritan ancestors gained from 
the Dutch among whom they dwelt so many 
years might be a question well worth inves- 
tigating. The policy of the rulers of En- 
gland in regard to their own people was of 
the same character as toward us, and it may 
not be charged against them that they en- 
forced upon us any more injurious or unjust 
measures than they inflicted upon them- 
selves. To the student of political science 
no lesson is more clearly indicated by the 
acts of Great Britain during the eighteenth 
century than the extreme danger and unfit- 
ness of restricting the control of government 



and the right of suffrage to the possessors 
of property only. Through a long series of 
years England was governed by those whose 
claim to rule was based mainly upon the 
possession of property ; during this period 
war was chronic, the profession of arms the 
one that gave the most influence and dis- 
tinction, and the theory of government was 
the rule of the few for the alleged protec- 
tion of the many, but the result was the 
privation of the many and the aggran- 
dizement of the few. 

The profession of the merchant and the 
tradesman was considered ignoble, and many 
of the great commercial and manufacturing 
cities were not represented in the govern- 
ment. Even the rude lesson imposed upon 
England by the success of the American col- 
onies in achieving their independence was 
not at once comprehended, and for fifty 
years more she struggled with economic er- 
ror, and under a false system of social phi- 
losophy sought to regulate and control the 
commerce of the world by restrictive stat- 
utes, carrying on gigantic wars, and burden- 
ing the English nation with the larger part 
of that enormous debt which even to this 
day retards its progress, and is one of the 
main causes of the poverty of so large a por- 
tion of the inhabitants of the British Isles. 
Not until 1824, or nearly fifty years after the 
publication of the Wealth of Nations, did its 
truths become so well understood as to cause 
even the beginning Cf reform ; at that date, 
under the lead of Huskisson, began the se- 
ries of changes which have relieved English 
commerce from the shackles of meddlesome 
legislation, but only within ten years has 
even her commerce been truly free and pros- 
perous. In 1820 there were over two thou- 
sand acts on the statute-book of Great Brit- 
ain unrepealed, which had been enacted at 
various dates for the regulation of commerce. 

It seems passing strange that England 
should have maintained her false theories 
in the face of such evidence as was present- 
ed in the history of the Dutch Republic. A 
century before Adam Smith's work was pub- 
lished the great merchant of London, Sir 
Josiah Child, gave his list of reasons why 
the Dutch were more prosperous than the 
English. His reasons sound strangely mod- 
ern, and are even in advance of our thought. 
He gave them in the following order : 



202 



COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT. 



Firstly. " They," the Dutch, " have in their 
greatest councils of state trading merchants 
that have lived abroad in most parts of tho 
world, by whom laws and orders are con- 
trived and peaces projected, to the great 
advantage of all men." 

Have the United States yet learned this 
first rule of prosperity during our first cen- 
tury of life as a nation ? 

Secondly. "Their law of gavelkind, where- 
by all the children possess an equal share 
of their father's estate." 

Thirdly. " Their exact making of all their 
native commodities, and packing of their 
herrings, cod-fish, and all other commodi- 
ties." 

Fourthly. "Their giving great encourage- 
ment and immunities to the inventors of 
new manufactures and the discoverers of 
new mysteries of trade, and to those that 
shall bring the commodities of other nations 
first in use and practice among them." 

Fifthly. " Their contriving and building 
of great ships to sail with small charges." 

Sixthly. "Their parsimonious and thrifty 
living." 

Seventhly. "The education of their chil- 
dren, as well daughters as sons ; all which, 
be they of never so great quality or estate, 
they always take care to bring up with per- 
fect good hands, and to have the full knowl- 
edge of arithmetic and merchants' accounts ; 
and in regard the women are as knowing 
therein as the men, it doth encourage their 
husbands to hold on to their trades to their 
dying days, knowing the capacity of their 
wives to get in their estates or carry on 
their trades after their death." 

Eighthly. "The lowness of their customs 
and the height of their excise, which last is 
certainly the most equal and indifferent tax 
in the world." 

Ninthly, "The careful providing for and 
employing the poor." 

Ten till y. "Their use of banks, which are 
of so immense advantage." 

Eleventhly. "Their toleration of different 
opinions in matters of religion." 

Twelfthly, "Their law-merchant, by which 
all controversies between merchant and 
tradesman are decided in three or four days." 

Thirtcenthly. "Their law for the transfer- 
ence of bills of debt from one man to an- 
other." 



Fourtcenthly. " Their keeping of public reg- 
isters of all lands and houses sold and mort- 
gaged." 

Lastly. " The lowness of interest on money 
with them." 

The jealousy on the part of England of 
the prosperity of the Dutch had, prior to 
the date of the last publication by Sir Jo- 
siah Child in 1691, caused them to enact 
the navigation laws, and these laws had 
then already caused two wars, as the result 
of which the first funded debt of Great 
Britain took form. The same jealousy con- 
tinued, and the same ignorance of the true 
theory of trade led to the enforcement of 
the navigation acts and the restrictions upon 
the trade of the American colonies. Resist- 
ance ensued, and the colonies became a na- 
tion. But the people of the mother country 
failed yet to see the error of their system, 
and again attempted to enforce the same 
bad laws against us, thus leading again to 
the last war with Great Britain. At last, 
slowly and surely, the English people learn- 
ed the lesson that the malign effect of such 
restriction was as injurious to themselves 
as to the people whom these acts had made 
their enemies. One by one they were re- 
pealed, and with each repeal England went 
onward toward the end she had failed to 
compass before. In liberty she has suprem- 
acy over every sea. 

We also have succeeded in what we aim- 
ed at ; we have maintained our navigation 
laws ; but our ships are few and scattered, 
our steam marine has mainly existed through 
subsidies, and our flag is unknown in har- 
bors and cities where the flag of other na- 
tions daily comes and goes at the mast-head 
of a gallant ship or a noble steamer. 

We have the lesson yet to learn. A hun- 
dred years hence, by which time it is to be 
hoped the people of this nation will have 
intelligently grasped the simple theory of 
trade, it is not to be doubted that the dec- 
laration of principles by Adam Smith will 
be recognized as of supreme importance to 
the human race, while the Declaration of 
Independence will be looked upon even by 
the citizens of this country only as an im- 
portant incident in the history of the An- 
glo-Saxon people, and the war which then 
ensued will be proved aud acknowledged 
to have been caused mainly by a want of 



INTERSTATE COMMERCE. 



203 



knowledge of that economic science of which 
Adam Smith was the first great expounder. 
If the people of this nation could but now 
respond to the grand forecasting of that 
true and humane statesman W. E. Forster, 
who lately visited us, and form an Anglo- 
Saxon alliance for the liberty of commerce, 
for the repression of slavery, for the doing 
away of privateering or piracy upon the 
seas, the end of all war among civilized 
people would be at hand, and the grand 
vision of the prophet would be realized— 
"They shall beat their swords into plow- 
shares, and their spears into pruning-hooks." 

To him who shall among us succeed in 
making this vision a grand and living truth 
will come deserved fame as great as ever 
yet belonged to any one among us ; but that 
good time has not yet come, and will not 
come until the simplest principles of polit- 
ical science are made a part of common ed- 
ucation. 

We do not undervalue the Declaration of 
Independence when we recognize the fact 
that the vast material progress in this coun- 
try during the century now about ending 
has ensued from only a partial realization 
of the principles of liberty therein contained. 
Our fathers threw off the fetters of British 
domination, but continued the restrictions 
of English thought, and they thus hamper- 
ed themselves and us from within with the 
very trammels they had resisted from with- 
out. 

It was not until the framing of the Con- 
stitution in 1787, and the adoption of the 
provision that no State should enact any law 
restricting commerce between the States, 
that even a true union was established. 

Never before that time had commerce upon 
a grand scale, and through vast regions dif- 
fering widely in soil, climate, and condition, 
been freed from restriction. And because 
of this partial liberty has the material wel- 
fare of the people of this country been so 
well assured as to blind them to the evils 
of the system that has prevented an exten- 
sion of our foreign commerce on an equally 
grand and profitable scale. Although the 
framers of the Constitution itself may not 
have fully comprehended the importance 
of this act, or the truly scientific basis on 
which they built, they did so organize and 
assure a system of absolute free trade be- 



tween the States that even the corruption 
of slavery failed to break the union. 

The Union exists to-day partly because 
the people of the West would not permit 
the traffic of the great Southern water-way 
of the continent to be under the control of 
a foreign nation, lest it should be obstruct- 
ed by custom-houses. When they present- 
ly realize the other fact that it is as impor- 
tant to them to have the traffic of the great 
Northern water-way through Canada as free 
from obstruction as the Southern water-way 
now is, another onward step will be taken, 
and another barrier to our full prosperity 
will fall — not this time, however, by violent 
means. 

In treating the subject of our commercial 
progress during the past century, it is not 
worth while to waste time and space upon 
mere commercial statistics which any one 
may compile, but rather to note the changes 
in policy and method that have occurred, 
and to see how far we are behind the posi- 
tion we might have held had we not been 
in some measure blinded to our opportu- 
nity by the very ease with which we have 
achieved great though but partial success. 

As was once said of the policy of Austria 
in its treatment of Hungary, the bad line 
of custom-houses with which we have sur- 
rounded ourselves has caused us "to be 
smothered in our own grease." Long an- 
terior to the year 1776 the infant manufac- 
tures of America had come into existence, 
and had obtained such a vigorous growth 
as to cause the utmost jealousy in the moth- 
er country. In 1750 the production of iron 
and steel and the manufacture of steel tools 
and iron wares had become so well estab- 
lished in America as to induce hostile legis- 
lation, and England prohibited the erection 
of rolling-mills and steel furnaces, and at- 
tempted to stop the domestic commerce in 
and the export of their products. This was 
one of the many acts which culminated in 
the separation of the colonies from England. 
The records of the owners of the Cornwall 
Iron Mouutain, in Pennsylvania, prove the 
working of the ores long anterior to the 
Revolution, and one of the carefully treas- 
ured documeuts now preserved in the office 
of the mine is the account current between 
the former owners and the commissary-gen- 
eral of the patriot army, wherein they are 



204 



COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT. 



credited by the government -with shot and 
shell, and charged with Hessian prisoners 
at thirty pounds a head, whose services they 
bought for the term of their being held as 
prisoners of war. 

Our ancestors were clothed in homespun, 
and the endeavor to stop commerce in wool 
and woolen cards was one of the most vex- 
ations restrictions imposed by the mother 
country. 

Our forefathers established a prosperous 
traffic among themselves, and sent commer- 
cial ventures in their small vessels to vari- 
ous ports of the world. But this was not 
to be permitted. The laws of England for- 
bade her colonies to trade with the colonies 
of France and Spain. The power of taxa- 
tion was invoked to prevent it. Naval offi- 
cers were made custom-house officers, not 
so much to collect revenue as to stop traffic 
altogether, just as the civil officers had pre- 
viously attempted to stop our manufactures. 

What we have failed to perceive is that 
the measures Avhich only provoked animos- 
ity when imposed from without are equally 
mischievous when enacted within. 

We have not yet learned that restrictions 
upon commerce are most injurious to those 
who enforce them, and by continuing the 
same navigation acts we have compassed 
the very result that Great Britain failed to 
accomplish by war. In one century we 
have reduced ourselves from the position 
of a dreaded maritime people to a position 
of comparative insignificance upon the sea. 
At the end of a century of vigorous life and 
effort we remain but a province, unable to 
keep our own flag at the mast-head of any 
fleet of modern vessels. 

But let us turn from this sorry picture of 
perverted force and ignorant striving to im- 
itate the long since discarded methods of 
England, to the far more satisfactory con- 
sideration of the result of our domestic com- 
merce and the prosperity that has ensued 
from its unrestricted character. It has been 
fortunate for us that within our own limits 
we possess such diversity of soil, climate, 
and condition as to have prevented the re- 
strictions upon foreign commerce from pro- 
ducing the same bad results as the restrict- 
ive policy caused and culminated in in Great 
Britain in 1841. At that time "the system 
which was supported with the view of ren- 



dering the country independent of foreign 
sources of supply, and thus, it was hoped, 
fostering the growth of home trade, had 
most effectually destroyed that trade by re- 
ducing the entire population to beggary, 
destitution, and want. In the manufac- 
turing districts mills and workshops were 
closed, and property daily depreciated in 
value; in the sea-ports shipping was laid 
up useless in the harbor; agricultural la- 
borers were eking out a miserable existence 
upon starvation wages and parochial relief, 
and the country was brought to the verge 
of national and universal bankruptcy." 

As we are now about to enter upon the 
hundredth year of our existence as a na- 
tion, this dark picture will only partially 
apply to those identical branches of indus- 
try which the government has especially 
attempted to promote by restrictive stat- 
utes. Depression rules the hour among the 
mills, the mines, and the iron-works ; strikes 
prevail in the factories ; bloodshed is com- 
mon at the mines ; but the stove-maker, the 
wood-worker, the tinsmith, the wagon-build- 
er, the blacksmith, the plow-maker, the mill- 
wright, the harness-maker, and thejr com- 
panions are busy and tolerably well employ- 
ed, and these are the ones who constitute 
the vast army of manufacturers who must 
exist in every civilized community. 

It is true that the depression in a few 
great branches of industry more or less af- 
fects all others, but it is also true that those 
special branches of industry are now the 
most depressed that have been most pro- 
tected, as it is called, by the government 
during the last half of the century just 
ending. 

We have only to glance at the vast force 
of free and industrious manufacturers and 
artisans, who are to be found in every cor- 
ner of our fair land, to perceive how a free 
inland commerce thrives and how true man- 
ufactures flourish in spite of and not because 
of the restrictive statutes. 

The great centres of manufacture and of 
agriculture are not to be found where they 
are usually sought, and the true and great 
diversity of our industry and the extent of 
our commerce may be most fully realized 
by tracing them out. The census of 1870 
gives us the data, and by it we find that 
the centre of manufacturing industry is in 



TRANSPORTATION. 



205 



the city and county of New York, whose 
product of manufactures in the year 1870 
exceeded $332,000,000 in value ; next conies 
Philadelphia, $322,000,000; next, St. Louis, 
$158,000,000 (in 1870, since increased to $239,- 
000,000 in 1875) ; and then follow Middlesex 
County, Massachusetts, $113,000,000 ; Suffolk 
County, Massachusetts, $112,000,000 ; Prov- 
idence County, Rhode Island, $85,000,000; 
Hamilton County, Ohio, $79,000,000 ; Balti- 
more County, Maryland, $59,000,000 ; Essex 
County, New Jersey, $52,000,000 ; San Fran- 
cisco, California, $37,000,000 ; and in smaller 
sums we find the manufacturing arts wher- 
ever cities, towns, or villages exist. 

Again, in agriculture the pre-eminence is 
not to be found in the West, where it would 
usually be sought, but in the list of coun- 
ties producing the largest aggregate value 
each in its own State we find that Pennsyl- 
vania is at the head, while others follow in 
the following order : 

Lancaster Co., Penn 950 sq. miles. . .$11,815,008 

St. Lawrence Co., N. Y.... 2900 " " ... 9,508,071 

Worcester Co., Mass 1500" " ... 6,351,411 

Hartford Co., Conn 80T " " ... 6,220,911 

La Salle Co., Ill 1050" " ... 5,502,502 

Oakland Co., Mich 900" " ... 5,154,231 

Burlington Co., N. J 600" " ... 4,908,839 

Then follow the rest of the champion coun- 
ties in agriculture, indicating as little of the 
commonly assumed order as to position and 
section as the manufacturing and mechanic 
arts. 

The exchanges of the products of these 
counties and States constitute our national 
commerce. It has been estimated that the 
aggregate of values moved over our seventy 
thousand miles of railroad in a year is over 
ten thousand million dollars, and for this 
service and for the transportation of passen- 
gers the sum of five hundred and twenty- 
six million dollars was paid in the year just 
ended. Yet all this vast movement is but 
for the supply of the simplest wants, and 
the utter futility of attempting to regulate 
or direct it by statute can be fully realized 
when we consider that it only exists because 
men choose to exchange bread for boots, 
beef for hats, pork for clothing, timber for 
dwellings, or the like. Thus commerce be- 
tween States differing as widely as almost 
any section of the earth's surface in soil, 
climate, and condition, also differing widely 
in the rate of interest, in the incidence of 



local taxation, and in the wages of labor, 
has yet called into existence our seventy 
thousand miles of railway, costing nearly 
four thousand million dollars, by means of 
which exchanges of goods were made last 
year estimated at two hundred million tons. 
Free commerce between the states of a great 
continent has induced this diversity of em- 
ployment, and this establishment of manu- 
factures in the immediate neighborhood of 
agriculture which assures prosperity to the 
mechanic, the manufacturer, and the farmer 
alike, while at the same time progress in the 
method of transportation has caused neigh- 
borhood to consist not so much in proximi- 
ty as in the elimination of time. This free- 
dom of commerce, and the division of labor 
that ensues from it, have led to certain re- 
sults in the distribution of population which 
call for a passing notice. The production 
of the cereal crops upon which our whole 
prosperity now depends has ceased to be a 
matter of manual labor to any great extent, 
but is carried on by means of machines of 
complex character requiring few hands to 
tend them in proportion to their product. 
Had it not been for these new methods 
the war for the preservation of the Union 
would have been almost impracticable, be- 
cause the million of men who were at one 
time in the loyal army could not have been 
spared without risk of famine ; but iu fact 
such had been the increased power of pro- 
duction and transportation that during the 
war, had the crops alone been considered, it 
would not have appeared that a single man 
had left his home upon the fields. 

A further result has come in this, that as 
a less number of hands are needed in the 
field, a greater number may be employed in 
the arts, and herein is an explanation of the 
greater relative increase in the manufactures 
of the country than in the products of agri- 
culture. This, again, has led to a far great- 
er concentration in towns and cities. The 
tendency to concentration has been to some 
extent counteracted by the homestead and 
land-grant system under which the public 
lands have been distributed, but it is to be 
doubted if even this cheap land has caused 
any great increase in the relative number 
of the agricultural population ; the new 
lands have been settled by a portion only 
of the immigrants from abroad, and by 



206 



COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT. 



the farmers from the East, who have only 
changed their place and their method of 
work. 

Men who have once been engaged in the 
arts or manufactures seldom return to the 
field, but the country lad does seek the 
town or city. It can not be doubted that 
this concentration in cities and towns will 
continue, and that population will be 
more and more condensed in narrow spaces, 
drawing their subsistence from long dis- 
tances, and exchanging, in ever-increasing 
abundance, the comforts and luxuries which 
they produce, for the food and fuel they 
consume ; and with this condensation will 
come the more pressing need of solving 
the method of governing and administer- 
ing great cities ; of draining and ventila- 
ting, and of providing for the imperative 
necessity of parks, play-grounds, commons, 
and other wide, open areas, in order that, 
with these vast material gains that accom- 
pany free commerce and the division of la- 
bor, there may not be a grave loss in the 
moral welfare and in the physical vigor of 
the race. 

The interdependence of our States and 
the service which each renders to the other 
find most homely illustration in a subject 
not fitted for poetic treatment, nor likely to 
appeal to the imagination — commerce in hogs. 

The great prairies of the West grow corn 
in such abundance that even now, with all 
our means of intercommunication, it can not 
all be used as food, and some of it is con- 
sumed as fuel. 

It often happens that the farmer upon 
new land, remote from railroads, can get 
only from fifteen to twenty cents per bushel 
for Indian corn, at which price, while it is 
the best, it is also the cheapest fuel that he 
can have, and its use is an evidence of good 
economy, not of waste. Upon the fat prai- 
rie lands of the West the hog is wholesome- 
ly fed only upon corn in the milk or corn in 
the ear; thence he is carried to the colder 
climate of Massachusetts, where by the use 
of that one crop in which New England ex- 
cels all others — ice — the meat can be pack- 
ed at all seasons of the year ; there it is pre- 
pared to serve as food for the workman of 
the North, the freedman of the South, or the 
artisan of Europe ; while the blood, dried in 
a few hours to a fine powder, and sent to 



the cotton fields of South Carolina and Geor- 
gia to be mixed with the phosphatic rocks 
that underlie their coast lands, serves to 
produce the cotton fibre which furnishes the 
cheapest and fittest clothing for the larger 
portion of the inhabitants of the world. 

Here, then, is commerce, or men serving 
each other on a grand scale, all developed 
within the century, and undreamed of by 
our ancestors. The vast plains of the West, 
enriched by countless myriads of buffalo, 
can spare for years to come a portion of 
their productive force. Commerce sets in 
motion her thousand wheels, food is borne 
to those who need it most, and they are 
spared the effort to obtain it on the more 
sterile soil of the cold North. Commerce 
turns that very cold to use. The refuse is 
saved, and commerce has discovered that its 
use is to clothe the naked in distant lands. 
Borne to the sandy but healthy soils of Geor- 
gia and South Carolina, it renovates them 
with the fertility thus transferred from the 
prairies of Illinois and Indiana, and pres- 
ently there comes back to Massachusetts the 
cotton of the farmer, the well-saved, clean, 
strong, and even staple which commerce 
again has discovered to be worth identify- 
ing as the farmer's, not the planter's, crop, 
made by his own labor and picked by his 
wife and children, to whom only a few short 
years since such labor was ignoble, and be- 
cause thus well saved worth a higher price. 

Had the custom-house officer stood upon 
the Hudson River and said to the farmer of 
Illinois, " Your corn and meat must not come 
here, lest by your cheap labor you ruin our 
farmers," as the custom-house officer of the 
United States now says to the farmer and 
miner of Canada, when they try to send food 
and fuel to New England ; had the tax- 
gatherer watched at the bar of the harbors 
of Charleston and Savannah to make the 
obstruction greater, lest the meat packed in 
New England should affect the price of the 
poor freedman's pigs, and lest the fertilizers 
made in Boston and Philadelphia should 
stop the phosphate works of those cities, as 
the custom-house officer of the United States 
now attempts to stop the refuse salt of for- 
eign production, even when only needed as 
a manure; had the revenue official of Mas- 
sachusetts stood ready to make the cotton 
more costly, as the custom-house officer of 



CONSUMPTION THE GAUGE OF PROSPERITY. 



207 



the United States now doubles the price of 
the wool of Canada — this commerce could 
not have existed, the men of the West could 
not have rendered service to New England, 
nor they to their Southern brethren, nor 
they again to the people of all lands and 
all climes. 

The century has witnessed the establish- 
ment of the culture and exchange of cot- 
ton, the extension of civilization over the 
prairies of the West, and the infinite and 
complex movements which we feebly try 
to grasp throughout all their ramifications, 
whereby the huugry are fed, the naked 
clothed, and the soil that has been burned 
over and scathed by slavery renewed and 
made more productive than ever before ; 
yet one of the chief instruments in this 
vast benefit, by which the general struggle 
for life has thus been made less arduous, 
has been nothing but a herd of swine. 

Turning a moment from this homely phase 
of progress, let us glance at another vast 
change. Early in the century a few small 
ships or barks sailed from New England, lad- 
en with muskets, beads, tobacco, and bales 
of red flannel, their destination the North- 
west coast. Upon the voyage the goods 
were made up into packages containing 
each one musket, a few yards of flannel, 
and a small portion of beads and tobacco, 
each package the price of a bale of fur 
skins. Arriving at their destination, the 
vessel was laden with the furs thus bought, 
and then she slowly wended her way to 
China, where teas, purchased at about the 
same ratio of profit, were taken on board, 
and, after a long period passed without be- 
ing heard from, the ship returned to Boston 
or Salem. Under this system tea was the 
luxury of the few ; now it is the comfort of 
the million. And how does it now reach 
the consumer? A telegram from St. Pe- 
tersburg to New York or Boston calls for 
supplies of wheat or barley for the Russian 
troops on the Amoor River, the merchant 
in Boston or New York sends the message 
to San Francisco, the grain is laden upon a 
vessel there, the banker's credit furnished 
by the Russian government is transferred 
in a moment to China or Japan, and within 
a few weeks the tea of China or Japan, 
brought over the Pacific Railroad, is being 
consumed in Chicago in exchange for the 



wheat or barley of California, of which the 
rations of the Russian troops may at the 
same moment consist. 

Were it not for the barriers that we main- 
tain between ourselves and other nations, 
by which most of our manufactures are 
made more costly than those of other coun- 
tries, orders not only for wheat and cotton 
and other crude products of the soil, but for 
the finer products of manufacturing indus- 
try, would be telegraphed for in the same 
manner, and we should serve the need of 
untold millions now almost unknown to us, 
receiving back that abundance of foreign 
comforts and luxuries of which we are in 
part deprived by the folly of economic su- 
perstition. 

We are deprived of them under the pre- 
tense that our laborers can not afford the 
consumption of foreign luxuries, but that all 
such importations impoverish the country. 

The end of all commerce is an abundant 
and general consumption not only of the nec- 
essary articles of subsistence, but of the 
comforts and luxuries of life ; and the ma- 
terial prosperity of the country is to be 
gauged by the amount of its annual con- 
sumption more than by the magnitude of 
its accumulations. 

The figures of the census, by which it 
is attempted to measure the wealth and 
progress of the people, are utterly falla- 
cious if taken by themselves, the true 
measure of material prosperity being the 
amount of comfort and of luxury that the 
wages of workmen, relatively equal in in- 
telligence and skill, will purchase at dif- 
ferent dates and in different places. 

A century since the man who now enjoys 
leisure and abundance, and whose hours of 
labor are not overlong, would have been 
forced to work the livelong day for a bare 
and coarse subsistence, while many of the ig- 
norant emigrants who now swarm through- 
out our land would have starved had they 
then attempted to come iuto the colonies. 

The great difference in the condition of 
the mass of the people a century since and 
at the present time consisted in this, that 
then nearly all knew how to get moderate 
comfort from little means, partly because 
the labor of that day was nearly all of a 
kind that stimulated intelligence ; there was 
much drudgery, but not the routine and 



208 



COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT. 



monotony which now mark the condition 
of those who do the commoner sort of work. 
The Irish servant of to-day can obtain for 
her wages better clothes and more of them, 
is furnished with better food and more of it, 
and is better and more comfortably housed 
than the mistress of the house a century 
since ; and these changes have come because 
the division of labor, the extension of com- 
merce, and the improvements in means of 
transport have brought distant places near, 
and have increased production. The work- 
man in the iron furnace, the weaver in the 
mill, the man who tends the machine in the 
boot factory, earns higher wages and may 
be able to live far better than the black- 
smith, the cobbler, or the carpenter of old 
time. But he earns his subsistence in a far 
different way, and the abundance that he 
may enjoy may not be an unalloyed benefit. 
Why is not the man or woman of to-day 
who performs the drudgery of the world 
equal in thrift and intelligence to those who 
once did the work which they now do ? 

The reason is not difficult to find. The 
cobbler then used his brain as well as his 
lapstone ; the blacksmith was an artisan, 
a leader in the church choir, aud a chief 
speaker in town-meetings ; the carpenter 
of that day was a craftsman ; with poor 
tools, unaided by machinery, he was com- 
pelled to hew out his dwelling-place, and 
he built it firmly and well ; the house and 
the man were built up together, and each 
was strong and true. 

The housewife spun and wove the very 
cloth in which the family was clad, and as 
the web was woven, thrift and intelligence 
made part of the warp and woof. Each man 
and woman was the " builder of a brain" as 
well as of a home, and there could be no 
comfortable subsistence without true man- 
hood and true womanhood. 

Commerce has changed these conditions, 
and we are now at one of the half-way 
places. The same labor and the same intel- 
ligence that then gave but a subsistence 
gained with arduous toil, but with much 
mental vigor, will now suffice to procure an 
ample ••onipetence and exemption from toil. 
The craftsman of the old time is the master 
of to-day, the housewife has become the 
mistress of a mansion; but the toiler of 
to-day is not the equal of the toiler of old 



time, and he could not then have subsisted 
at all. Commerce, invention, and the divis- 
ion of labor have increased abundance, but 
have also, to a considerable extent, sepa- 
rated the functions of those who work with 
the head from those who work with the 
hand ; they have raised a large portion of 
the community to a higher plane of comfort 
and luxury than could have been even 
dreamed of a century since, and in so doing 
have made a place and created occupations 
for those who could not then have existed at 
all in regions or countries which now have 
a dense population ; but these occupations 
are of a new kind, and many of the methods 
by which this comfort and abundance are 
obtained tend to deaden the intelligence 
and to promote a merely animal existence. 
May it not be that one of the causes of the 
uneasiness of those who toil, and who con- 
stitute the laboring classes of some sections, 
comes from the monotony of their work 
rather than from the want of material com- 
fort? Man can not live by bread alone, 
and ten or eleven hours a day spent in 
watching a machine, while they may yield 
more bread and meat than the hand spin- 
ner and weaver of a century since ever earn- 
ed, may yet be devoid of that use of the 
mental faculties that alone makes existence 
tolerable. 

Where the operation of the machine tends 
to relieve the operative of all thought, the 
man or woman who tends it risks becoming 
a machine, well oiled and cared for, but in- 
capable of independent life. The culture 
of the past was more diffused, but it was 
obtained by means of the very toil that was 
needed to gain subsistence, because the work 
itself called upon all the faculties, and was 
not a matter of routine ; the culture and re- 
finements of to-day come from leisure and 
opportunity more than from the develop- 
ment of men in the necessary work of their 
lives. May it not be possible that one of 
the causes of the great demand which exists 
for bad and sensational books and for excit- 
ing amusements comes from the dreary mo- 
notony of many of the necessary occupations 
of men and women, and that one of the most 
essential developments of commerce or of 
mutual service in the future will be in the 
direction of more ample provision for whole- 
some amusements ? As has been well said 



EESTRICTIONS UPON EXCHANGE. 



201) 



by an eminent and truly orthodox divine, 
"Amusement is a force in Christian life;" 
and unless this need is well served by the 
saints, we may be very sure that it will be 
ill served by those whose title is not saintly. 
How to provide cheap and wholesome amuse- 
ments for those who toil is one of the great 
problems of commerce which must be solved. 

We have said that much of the necessary 
work of the laboring people fails to develop 
character. In a higher walk of life, even 
the merchants of former days, though their 
ventures were small, their vessels of but few 
tons, and though their gains would only have 
been those of the small shop-keepers of the 
present time, yet seem to have been men of 
a larger type and of finer mould than the 
great tradesmen of our time. The mer- 
chant's work then called for foresight, en- 
ergy, and a wide comprehension ; but steam 
and the telegraph are great levelers, and the 
success of the merchant of to-day depends 
more on routine, method, and capital. 

The grander men of this time, who would 
once have been great merchants, are now 
the builders of railroads and great works, 
the tool-makers and the machine-builders, 
the masters of the arts of all kinds. 

On the other hand, the theory of Malthus 
that population gained luster than the means 
of subsistence, and that men must die of war, 
pestilence, and famine in an ever-increasing 
ratio, finds as yet no warrant in the expe- 
rience of men. Commerce has eliminated 
time and distance, while invention and dis- 
covery have yielded greater and greater 
abundance for each given portion of time 
devoted to the work of procuring subsist- 
ence ; and the one great fact which espe- 
cially indicates the progress of commerce in 
the century just ending is this, that more 
men may now live, and need not die, on any 
given area in the civilized world than was 
possible a century since. This is as true of 
parts of our own country as it is of other 
countries. 

The "progressive desire" which distin- 
guishes men from brutes has been met by 
ever-increasing power of satisfaction. But 
it is not sufficient to have achieved only the 
means of living: life must be made worth 
living to each and all. 

We have said that the nation is at one of 
the half-way points : division of labor and 
14 



the extension of commerce have increased 
the supply of all that men need for subsist- 
ence, while altering the conditions of much 
of the work, so that it has become monoto- 
nous drudgery. On the other hand, the uses 
that have been found for refuse and offen- 
sive substances have led to inventions that 
have removed the degrading conditions 
from many kinds of necessary labor. 

If we consider society as a pyramid, the 
constant rising of the apex has opeued the 
way for a broader and firmer base of useful 
employment, and it can not be questioned 
that the constant tendency is toward a 
steady reduction of the necessary hours of 
labor, and a constant increase of the oppor- 
tunity for mental stimulus in the hours of 
leisure ; hence, as the labor of production 
becomes more and more a matter of machin- 
ery and apparatus rather than of individual 
exertion of brain and muscle, the capability 
for enjoyment which all covet but few at- 
tain will surely come for the mass of men, 
but it must come from culture and educa- 
tion outside their work, and not in the work 
itself. Hence it follows that the need of 
our time is not so much the promotion of 
greater abundance of material thiugs, be- 
cause the abundance exists even at this very 
moment to the extent of plethora, but the 
removal of the obstacles which exist in the 
form of meddlesome statutes and constant 
attempts to hinder, by restrictive methods, 
that free exchange by which alone can even 
abundance be made a blessing. 

It is a fact not to be gainsaid, that even 
at this moment the only conditions requisite 
to a comfortable subsistence for man or 
woman in this country are prudence, intel- 
ligence, health, and integrity. The question 
is not one of the supply of the things needed, 
but of the method of obtaining them; and 
yet our ever-increasing wealth is accompa- 
nied by increasing poverty ; the attempt to 
protect, foster, and promote certain specified 
branches of industry by restricting exchange 
has enervated and emasculated those to 
whom the artificial stimulus has been given, 
and has obstructed the progress of those 
whose occupations could not from their 
very nature be included in the attempt to 
protect. 

Added to these removable causes of harm 
we have another more subtle and vicious 



210 



COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT. 



cause of a false and unjust distribution of 
the abundance of material things that we 
produce. We shall enter upon our second 
century of life as a nation under the curse 
of bad money. The most essential tool of 
our trade, the medium by which all the ex- 
changes that constitute our commerce are 
made, is the dishonored promise of the na- 
tion. Issued under the stress of war, it 
continues to inflict the curse of war long 
after peace and plenty have become assured. 
Of it may be said, as was said of the legal- 
tender paper money of the Revolution, that 
it has polluted the equity of our laws, and 
turned them into engines of oppression and 
wrong; that it has corrupted the justice of 
our public administration ; that it has en- 
ervated the trade, husbandry, and manufac- 
tures of our country ; that it has gone far to 
destroy the morality of our people ; and that 
it has done more injustice than the arms 
and artifices of the enemies of the Union for 
whose subjugation it was issued. 

Thus does it appear that the century just 
ending, the first of the strictly commercial 
age, has been marked by greatly increased 
power over the productive forces of nature, 
and that the promises of the future materi- 
al welfare of the nation are grand indeed. 
What we now need is greater liberty and a 



broader education, with instruction in what 
constitutes the true use of leisure, in order 
that there may not be the shadow of truth 
in the charge sometimes made that for a 
large portion of the community leisure is 
now but another name for license. 

The legal obstructions to our true pros- 
perity are maintained by the influence of 
the rich, and not of the poor ; not willfully 
in the face of better knowledge, but because 
they are still misled as to the true function 
of commerce. We have provided well for 
the common education of the poor, and that 
provision is now our salvation. When we 
shall have as fitly provided for the higher 
education of the rich, when we shall have 
reversed the old order, and it shall be the 
conviction of every man born to fortune 
that only the idle man is ignoble, then will 
the merchant, the tradesman, and the man- 
ufacturer fill their true places in the order 
of events. Then will come the time when 
peace and good- will may reign among the 
nations of the earth, and when by means of 
free commerce there shall be for the millions 
yet unborn not only material comfort and 
welfare, but the opportunity fully enjoyed 
for general culture and refinement, coupled 
with mental and spiritual progress never 
yet attained. 



VII. 



GROWTH AND DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION. 



OF the five maps which illustrate the 
present paper, the first exhibits the ac- 
quisition of territory by the United States 
from 1776 to the present time. The second 
shows the areas actually covered by popu- 
lation at each alternate decennial census 
from 1790 to 1870. The third presents the 
movement of the centre of population, the 
" star of empire," if the reader please, across 
the face of the country from east to west, 
upon the line of the thirty-ninth degree 
north latitude, from its first recorded posi- 
tion, twenty-three miles east of Baltimore, 
in 1790, to its resting-place in 1870, forty- 
eight miles east by north of Cincinnati. We 
said its resting-place : we should have said 
its last recorded position, for the time has 
not yet come for it to stand in its place above 
any favored town or city in the land. Its 
course is still westward ; and while we write 
it is pressing on with an equable motion of 
seventy or seventy-five feet a day in a direc- 
tion generally west, but also slightly north. 
The fourth map is illustrative of interstate 
migration; showiug the habitat at 1870 of 
the natives of New York and of South Caro- 
lina severally. The fifth exhibits in three 
degrees the density of population within 
the area settled at 1870 east of the 100th 
meridian. 

If we examine the first of these maps, we 
shall find ten divisions of the existing ter- 
ritory of the United States noted thereon ; 
but these, for our present purpose, may be 
consolidated into seven, namely : the origi- 
nal thirteen States ; the original Western 
Territory (embracing the territory north- 
west of the river Ohio, Kentucky and Ten- 
nessee, and the Mississippi Territory) ; the 
French cession of 1803 (called Louisiana) ; 
the Spanish cession of 1819 (Florida) ; the 
Texan annexation of 1845 ; the Mexican ces- 
sions of 1848 and 1853 ; and last, though, 
perhaps unfortunately, not least, the Rus- 
sian cession of 1868 (Alaska). 

Of these the first comprises 420,892 square 
miles, and contained in 1870 about eighteen 
millions of inhabitants ; the second com- 



prises 406,952 square miles, with thirteen 
and a half millions of inhabitants ; the 
third, 1,171,931 square miles, with five and a 
quarter millions of inhabitants ; the fourth, 
59,268 square miles, with less than two hun- 
dred thousand inhabitants ; the fifth, 376,133 
square miles, with about eight hundred and 
thirty thousand inhabitants ; the sixth, 
591,318 square miles, with about the same 
population as the fifth ; the seventh, 577,390 
square miles, with but four or five hundred 
white inhabitants. 1 

Although the Spanish and Mexican ces- 
sions comprise towns which far antedate 
the earliest settlements within the original 
thirteen States, it is to the latter that we 
must first turn in any attempt to broadly 
grasp the history of population within the 
United States. But we shall fail to reach 
the full significance of the situation if we 
only give to ourselves, as reasons for treat- 
ing this portion of territory first in order, 
its present population, exceeding that of 
any other section, its earlier political de- 
velopment, or its more conspicuous figure 
in American history. It is not more, but 
rather less, on account of these than on ac- 
count of the actual contributions which this 
section has made to the population of each 
one in turn of the other geographical divis- 
ions of the United States, early or recent, 
that the writer on population must turn 
first to Jamestown and Plymouth, or he 
will read his theme backward. St. Augus- 
tine (1565) and Santa F6 (1582) were, indeed, 
planted before English Cavalier or English 
Puritan sought the more northern lauds for 
settlement ; but St. Augustine and Santa Fe 
were a barren stock, and the populations 
that to-day occupy the regions in which 
these were planted in the sixteenth century 

1 These statements of population are exclusive of 
Indians, who are not embraced in a census of the 
United States. On their account there should be add- 
ed to No. 1 about six thousand souls ; to No. 2 about 
twenty-six thousand ; to No. 3 about one hundred and 
sixty thousand ; to No. 5 perhaps thirty thousand ; to 
No. 6 about eighty thousand ; and to No. 7 about sev- 
enty thousand. 



212 



GROWTH AND DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION. 




THE THIRTEEN STATES. 



213 



have poured forth from States founded in 
penury and neglect long afterward. When 
the great province of Louisiana came to us, 
in 1803, more than three centuries after the 
discovery of the maiu-land of America, it 
contained, from the delta of the Mississippi 
to Puget Sound, scarcely twenty thousand 
white inhabitants. That this vast territory 
now contains more than five millions of in- 
habitants, who will by 1880 be eight millions 
or ten, is not due to the robustness of the 
stock which Jefferson annexed with the 
soil, or mainly to direct immigration. 1 In 
like manner, when we received Florida from 
Spain by the treaty of 1819, not consum- 
mated, however, until 1821, the white popu- 
lation was but twelve or fifteen thousand, 
so slight had been the fecundity of the 
Spanish settlements. And when, in 1822, 
Congress directed the Postmaster-General 
to make provision for a post-route from St. 
Augustine to Pensacola, that officer was 
obliged to report the next year as follows: 

"Diligent inquiry has been made, and it does not 
appear that there is a road between these places on 
the route designated on which the mail can be con- 
veyed. There are Indian paths which pass through 
different Indian settlements, but none, it is under- 
stood, that extend for any considerable distance in 
the proper direction." 

And so late as 1850, the first date for 
which we have the statistics of nativity 
in the United States, it was found that of 
the free inhabitants of Florida more had 
been born in the original thirteen States 
than in Florida itself, while less than six 
per cent, of the free inhabitants were of for- 
eign birth. The Texan annexation, again, 
now contains about 830,000 souls ; but when 
Texas revolted from Mexico, it contained 
probably not more than 40,000, of whom 
by far the greater part had come, in antic- 
ipation 2 of "manifest destiny," from the 
States. In 1850, of the free inhabitants 
scarcely more than one -third, including, 
of course, an undue proportion of chil- 
dren, were natives of Texas. 

In the same way the first Mexican ces- 

1 At the southeastern extremity only are the effects 
of direct immigration traceable in any marked degree. 
New Orleans has been to some extent supported by 
arrivals from Mexico and the West Indies, as well as 
from France, Ireland, and Germany. 

= Indeed, the immigration into Texas had been large- 
ly for the very purpose of wresting the country from 
Mexico. 



sion, when taken possession of by the Unit- 
ed States, embraced but a small white pop- 
ulation. Of tliis tract it is true that, in the 
furious excitement caused by the discovery 
of gold at Sutter's Mill in 1848, it was set- 
tled more largely than any other had been 
by direct immigration. Yet of the first 
eighty thousand eager gold-hunters who 
pressed into the valleys of California, more 
than three-fourths were born in the East, 
of whom one-half, as nearly as might be, 
were natives of the original thirteen States, 
while probably not less than two-thirds of 
the remainder would be found to be cis- 
appalachian in their origin, could we go 
but thirty years further back. 

Of the second Mexican cession, the Gads- 
den purchase of 1853, embracing the terri- 
tory south of the river Gila, iu Arizona and 
New Mexico, little can be said any way. 
Two or three hundred whites, insecurely 
guarded by perhaps as uiany soldiers, as yet 
constitute the population of this treeless, 
trackless desert. 

Twenty-three degrees to the north, under 
the very " shadow of the pole," lies, securely 
frozen up, the latest purchase of the United 
States, a region as large as Great Britain, 
France, Spain, and the German Empire com- 
bined, all the eligible portions of which are 
now devoted to the preservation in theory 
and extermination in fact of fur -bearing 
seal. 

It is not so easy to show statistically the 
derivation of the people of the original ter- 
ritory of the United States from the original 
thirteen States, but it is, at the same time, 
less needful. Our history from 1763 onward 
is full of the migrations from the Atlantic 
slope into the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, 
at first through the passes of the Allegha- 
nies, and later by the lakes and around the 
southern extremity of the great coast chain. 
And even of the vast immigration from Eu- 
rope which has helped to build up these 
nine interior States between the mountains 
and the river, no small part, perhaps the 
greater part, has been received from the 
original States, not merely through their 
ports, but after a period of residence, accli- 
mation, and often even of naturalization at 
the East. 

So incessant had been the fresh supply 
of Eastern blood, so little had the " Great 



214 



GROWTH AND DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION. 



West" of two or three generations ago been 
left to the propagation of the stock then 
planted there, that, so late as 1850, seventy- 
five years after Kentucky was founded, more 
than one-fourth of the free inhabitants of 
these nine States had been born east of the 
mountains, while, if the adult inhabitants 
only had been taken into account, the pro- 
portion must have greatly exceeded one- 
third, if, indeed, it did not reach nearly to 
one-half. 

If thus the early settlements in what we 
shall always know as the " Thirteen States" 
were vastly more prolific than those made 
by the Spaniards and French at the south 
and southwest, they also greatly surpassed 
in the vigor of their growth the settle- 
ments to the north and northeast, whether 
by the French or the English. In 1754, 
when the thirteen colonies aggregated of 
whites and blacks nearly a million and a 
half, New France, though planted at the 
same time with Virginia, had scarcely a 
hundred thousand people, mainly collected 
on the St. Lawrence, between Quebec and 
Montreal. 

" At the time of Queen Elizabeth's death 
(1603)," writes the annalist of America, 
"which was 110 years after the discovery 
of America by Columbus, neither the French, 
Dutch, nor English, nor any other nation 
excepting the Spanish, had made any per- 
manent settlement in this New World. In 
North America to the north of Mexico not a 
single European family could be found." 1 

Between 1607 and 1733 were founded all 
the original States of the American Union. 
The order of their settlement and the main 
facts of their growth in population while 
colonies of Great Britain are, if not essen- 
tial, at least important to a comprehension 
of their history as independent States, and 
still more to an understanding of the origin 
of the twenty-four equal members of the 
Union which have come into existence since 
1789. 

1607-1660. 

By a natural grouping of the facts of our 
early settlement, one who chooses to regard 
the growth of population merely, irrespect- 
ive of grants, charters, and political insti- 

1 Holmes's Annals, i. 123. 



tutions, may consider the colonies in three 
classes — those of New England, the middle 
colonies, and those to the South, from and 
in eluding Maryland. 

The first permanent settlement within the 
territory of the original States was at James- 
town, Virginia, on the James River, 1607, by 
a colony of about 100 English. For twelve 
years the colony grew slowly, so that but 
600 persons, men, women, and children, were 
counted among the inhabitants at the be- 
ginning of 1619. During the two years 
which followed, however, the number was 
increased nearly sixfold. At the outbreak 
of the civil war in England the population 
was estimated at 20,000, which was probably 
in excess of the true number. 

Mr. Bancroft explains as follows the lia- 
bility to " glaring mistakes in the enumera- 
tions" in the Southern provinces : " The mild 
climate invited emigrants to the inland 
glades ;" " the crown-lands were often occu- 
pied on warrants of surveys without pat- 
ents, or even without warrants ;" " the peo- 
ple were never assembled but at muster." 

The settlement of Maryland was closely 
connected with that of Virginia. In 1631-32 
Captain William Clayborne established small 
settlements on Kent Island, in Chesapeake 
Bay, and also near the mouth of the Susque- 
hanna. In 1634 a colony of about 200 En- 
glish was planted at St. Mary's, on the main- 
land, under Leonard Calvert, brother of the 
proprietary, Lord Baltimore. Virginia and 
Maryland were the only colonies of the 
Southern group which were planted prior 
to the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660. At 
that date they were estimated to contain 
respectively 30,000 and 12,000 inhabitants. 

Passing northeastward to New England, 
we find the first settlement made in 1620 by 
a body of about 100 English at Plymouth, 
withiu the present limits of Massachusetts, 
constituting what was, until 1692, known as 
the " Plymouth Colony." In 1643 this col- 
ony had grown to contain seven town- 
ships. 

In 1628 a colony was planted at Salem, 
on Massachusetts Bay ; in 1630 and 1633 
large accessions were received ; in 1634 the 
settlements were reported as extending 
thirty miles from the capital ; 1635 was a 
year of rapid extension ; by 1636 popula- 
tion had reached the Connecticut, and 



NEW ENGLAND SETTLEMENTS. 



211; 



Springfield was settled. There were now 
twenty " towns," and the colony was divided 
into three "regiments." During the sum- 
mer of 1638 twenty ships arrived with 2000 
persons. The colony was divided into four 
counties. Iu 1640 it was at its highest point 
of prosperity within the period we are con- 
sidering. " The number of emigrants who 
had arrived in New England before the as- 
sembling of the Long Parliament is esti- 
mated to have been 21,200 ; 198 ships had 
borne them across the Atlantic." 1 Hil- 
dreth adds : " The accessions which New 
England henceforward received were more 
than counterbalanced by perpetual emigra- 
tion." 2 

The Puritans in England, instead of flee- 
ing before Acts of Conformity, were now 
engaged in reforming church and state to 
suit themselves. 

In 1660 there were three towns on the 
Connecticut Kiver within the jurisdiction 
of Massachusetts. 

For the first settlement of New Hamp- 
shire, Mr. Bancroft assigns the date 1623, 
permanent plantations being then establish- 
ed on the Piseataqua. Dover and Ports- 
mouth are among the oldest towns in New 
England. The province grew at first very 
slowly. 

Of the first settlements within the State 
of Maine, Bancroft remarks (i. 331): "It is 
not possible, perhaps, to ascertain the pre- 
cise time when the rude shelters of the fish- 
ermen on the coast began to be tenanted by 
permanent inmates, and the fishing stages 
of a summer to be transferred into regular 
establishments of trade. The first settle- 
ment was probably made ' on the Maine,' but 
a few miles from Monhegan, at the mouth 
of the Pemaquid." The probable date as- 
signed is 1626. 

In 1636 Providence, in the present State 
of Rhode Island, was planted by Roger Will- 
iams and five companions. In 1638 the 
"Rhode Island Colony" was established on 
the Isle of Rhodes by William Coddington 
and eighteen associates. Six years later 
Rhode Island and Providence plantations 
were united in self-government. 

In 1633 trading posts were established 
within the limits of the present State of 

1 Bancroft, United States, i. 415. 
= Hist. United States,!. 261. 



Connecticut, both by Dutch from New Neth- 
erlands (New York), and by English from 
Plymouth, the former at Hartford, the latter 
at Windsor. 

During 1635 removals took place from 
Massachusetts to Wethersfield and Windsor, 
and in 1636 these towns, with Hartford, were 
occupied, constituting the " Connecticut 
Colony." In 1645 there were eight taxable 
towns within the colony. 

In 1633 a settlement was made at New 
Haven, which, with its adjacent towns, con- 
stituted the " New Haven Colony," until it 
was united with the Connecticut Colony 
by charter of Charles II. The consolidated 
colony contained nineteen towns, distrib- 
uted among four counties. 

We have thus shown the beginnings 
east of the Hudson of four of the original 
thirteen States, prior to 1660. At 1640 
these contained twelve independent com- 
munities, with not less than fifty towns or 
distinct settlements ; but before the Res- 
toration a consolidation had taken place, 
which reduced the separate jurisdictions to 
six. 1 

Of the central group of colonies New York 
was first settled. The Dutch had for some 
years maintained trade with the natives at 
Manhattan and up the Hudson River. In 
1623-24 "New Netherlands" was planted, 
and a permanent settlement, called New 
Amsterdam, was made at Manhattan, the 
site of the present city of New York. By 
1656 the village had been laid out into sev- 
eral small streets ; 1660 found the Dutch 
still in possession, as well as disputing the 
title to Western Connecticut. The popu- 
lation at that date of New Netherlands, 
which in 1647 was hardly 2000 or 3000, 
even including the Swedes on the Del- 
aware (Hildreth, i. 436), had risen to about 
10,000, of whom 1500 resided, in New Am- 
sterdanu 

One part of the present State of New 
York, however, has a history which direct- 
ly connects its settlement both with New 
England and with the central group of 
colonies. 

Long Island was first settled at its west- 
ern end, under the protection of the Dutch, 
and a number of towns were a little later 

i midreth, United States, i. 26T. 



216 



GROWTH AND DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION. 



planted there by this people. 1 The eastern 
portion of the island was settled about 1640 
by Puritans from Lynn, Massachusetts, and 
from the New Haven Colony, and these set- 
tlements grew rapidly to meet those advan- 
cing from the west. The island was parti- 
tioned by the treaty of 1650 between the 
Dutch and the English, and so remained un- 
til the fall of the Dutch power in 1664. 

In 1631 a small settlement had been made 
by the Dutch near Lewistown, within the 
present State of Delaware, but the young 
colony was entirely cut off by Indians a 
year later. In 1638 a company of Swedes 
and Finns, under the then renowned flag of 
Sweden, arrived in Delaware, and built a 
fort near the mouth of the creek, which they 
called Christiana. The Swedish settlements 
soon extended northward almost to the pres- 
ent site of Philadelphia. In 1655, however, 
the fear of Swedish arms had so far abated 
that the Dutch from Manhattan accomplish- 
ed the subjection of Delaware to the domin- 
ion of Holland. 

This completes the tale of colonies plant- 
ed within the limits of the thirteen States 
prior to the Restoration. Thus at 1660 the 
only English colonies were those of New 
England, Virginia, aud Maryland, estimated 
to contain in all not more than eighty thou- 
sand inhabitants. 

1660-1688. 

Within a few years from the Restoration 
the Dutch colonists of New Netherlands 
(New York), as well as the Dutch, Swedish, 
and Finnish residents of Delaware, were 
brought under English dominion, and the 
colonies of New Jersey and Carolina were 
planted. 

Settlements had been made in what is 
now New Jersey very early in the seven- 
teenth century. Dutch, Swedes, and Finns, 
English, Dutch again, and again English, 
had successively appeared and disappeared 
in the course of the early contests for the 
sovereignty of the soil. " Here and there," 
says Bancroft, 2 " in the counties of Glouces- 



1 Anabaptist refugees from Massachusetts settled 
Newtown and Gravesend, under Dutch protection. So 
numerous were the English-speaking inhabitants of 
the Dutch part of the island that an English secretary 
was appointed. — Hildreth, i. 417. 

2 Hist. United States, ii. 316. 



ter and Burlington a Swedish farmer may 
have preserved his dwelling on the Jersey 
side of the river, and before 1664 perhaps 
three families were established about Bur- 
lington ; but as yet West New Jersey had 

not a hamlet. In East Jersey a trading 

station seems in 1618 to have been occupied 
at Bergen. In December, 1651, August Her- 
man purchased but hardly took possession 
of the land that stretched from Newark 
Bay to the west of Elizabethtown ; while 
in January, 1658, other purchasers obtained 
the large grant called Bergen, where the 
early station became a permanent settle- 
ment. Before the end of 1664 a few fam- 
ilies of Quakers appear also to have found 
a refuge south of Raritan Bay." 

In 1664 the settlement of New Jersey be- 
gan under conflicting grants. There were 
soon four towns — Elizabeth, Newark, Mid- 
dletown, and Shrewsbury. In 1676 New 
Jersey was divided as East and West New 
Jersey, the latter being purchased by the 
Quakers, who settled Burlington the follow- 
ing year. In 1682 the towns of East Jersey 
were supposed to have 700 families ; those 
of West Jersey perhaps as many persons. 

In 1663 Carolina was granted to eight 
proprietors ; but it would appear that Al- 
bemarle had been settled already 1 by the 
growth southward of the Nansemond set- 
tlement just on the borders of the Virginia 
grant. 

Two or three years prior to the grant, 
moreover, it would appear that a settlement 
had been effected by men from New En- 
gland on the southern bank of Cape Fear 
River. Whatever remained of this settle- 
ment was, however, absorbed by a colony 
planted near the same spot in 1665 by the 
exertions of the proprietary, and which so 
prospered that in 1666 it embraced 800 per- 
sons. 

In 1670 a company, brought out in three 



1 "Perhaps a few vagrant families were planted 
within the limits of Carolina before the Restoration." 
—Bancroft, ii. 134, 135. 

The historian Grahame charged that scarce any his- 
torian at his day had correctly given the facts relating 
to the early settlement of Carolina. " Even that labo- 
rious and generally accurate writer, Jedediah Morse, 
has been so far misled by defective materials as to as- 
sert {American Gazetteer) that the first permanent set- 
tlement in North Carolina was formed by certain Ger- 
man refugees in 1710."— Hist. United States in North 
America, ii. Ill, n. 



GEORGIA, VIRGINIA, AND THE CAROLINAS. 



217 



ships, settled on the Ashley River, at " Old 
Charlestown." 

In 1671-72 Dutch both from New York 
and from Holland arrived at the Ashley 
River settlement. Subsequently, it would 
appear, to both these dates — perhaps 1679 
or 1680 — the colonists generally passed over 
to the west bank of Cooper River, and set- 
tled on Oyster Point, which became the city 
of Charleston. 

In 1681 Pennsylvania was planted. The 
growth of this colony was rapid. In the 
first three years " fifty sail" arrived with 
settlers. 

Thus, prior to 1688, the period of the great 
Revolution in England, we see settlements 
made within the territory of all the origiual 
thirteen States except Georgia. The whole 
population of the colonies at this time was 
about 200,000, "of whom," says Bancroft, 1 
" Massachusetts, with Plymouth and Maine, 
may have had 44,000 ; New Hampshire and 
Rhode Island, with Providence, each 6000; 
Connecticut, from 17,000 to 20,000— that is, 
all New England, 75,000 souls ; New York, 
not less than 20,000; New Jersey, half as 
many; Pennsylvania and Delaware, perhaps 
12,000 ; Maryland, 25,000 ; Virginia, 50,000 or 
more ; and the two Carolinas, which then 
included the soil of Georgia, probably not 
less than 8000 souls." 

1688-1754. 

In 1733 Georgia was settled and Savan- 
nah founded by Oglethorpe, with about one 
hundred and twenty persons. In 1734 Au- 
gusta was laid out. The immigrants of this 
year were computed at six hundred. In 1835 
a colony of Highlanders planted New Inver- 
ness, in Darien. In 1736 Oglethorpe brought 
out three hundred emigrants. 

But though perhaps the most auspicious- 
ly founded of all the colonies except Penn- 
sylvania, the growth of Georgia was not 
rapid, and more than twenty years after 
its settlement we find the Board of Trade 
estimating its white inhabitants at but 
3000. 2 

i Hist. United States, ii. 450. 

5 Grahame {Hist. United States, ii. 403, n.), referring 
to the many inconsistent statements of the popula- 
tion of the colonies at different dates, says: "Even 
writers so accurate and sagacious as Dwight and 
Holmes have been led to underrate the early popula- 
tion of North America by relying too far on the esti- 



Meanwhile we find the other twelve col- 
onies growing very unequally, both as we 
compare one colony with another and as we 
compare one epoch with another. 1 

In Virginia the number of " tithables" ( i. e., 
free males above sixteen years, and slaves 
above that age of both sexes) had been esti- 
mated in 1691 at 14,000 ; in 1703 the number 
was computed at 25,023 ; in 1754 the " tith- 
ables" had increased to nearly 100,000. 

In the Carolinas the growth bad been rap- 
id in both the white and the black popula- 
tion. In 1700 5500 white inhabitants were 
counted. In 1723 the white inhabitants of 
that part alone which became South Caro- 
lina were estimated at 14,000 ; the slaves 
(negroes and a few Indians) at 18,000. 2 In 
1729 the crown, having bought out the pro- 
prietors, formed Carolina into two distinct 
royal provinces, North and South Carolina. 
In 1730 the negroes of South Carolina were 
estimated at 28,000. This sudden increase 
in the estimate of their number may have 
been in some measure due to the alarm 



mates which the provincial governments furnished to 
the British ministry for the ascertainment of the num- 
bers of men whom they were to be required to supply for 
the purposes of naval and military expeditions." The 
reason suggested for the probable disparagement of 
the early population of the colonies has not a little 
force. 

1 In his History of the United States, vol. iv. p. 128, 
Mr. Bancroft expresses the opinion that " he who, like 
H. C. Carey, in his Principles of Political Economy, Part 
iii. p. 25, will construct retrospectively general tables 
from the rule of increase in America since 1790, will 
err very little." The writer must dissent from this 
opinion. The approximate regularity of increase from 
1790 to 1860 was due to the fact that the accession by 
immigration bore a very small proportion to the total 
population. Thus, Professor Tucker places the for- 
eign arrivals at 50,000 for the period 1790-1800, 70,000 
for 1800-10, 114,000 for 1810-20, and this with an ag- 
gregate population rising meanwhile from four to 
nine and a half millions. Moreover, that immigration 
tended more and more to uniformity as between indi- 
vidual years. In the period before the Revolution, 
however, to which Mr. Bancroft refers, the average 
annual foreign arrivals unquestionably bore a much 
higher ratio to the existing population, and the im- 
migration was very spasmodic and without system. 
Thus in 1750, when the total population of the thir- 
teen colonies was, by Mr. Bancroft's estimates, a mill- 
ion and a quarter, we have an account of 5317 persons 
arriving in that single year in the single colony of 
Pennsylvania; and in 1729, when the total population 
must have been about 650,000, we find 6208 persons ar- 
riving in the same colony. Where disturbing elements 
of such magnitude enter, subject to no law that any one 
can presume to state, such computations as Mr. Ban- 
croft suggests become most fallacious. 

2 Hewatt, i. 30S, 309. 



218 



GROWTH AND DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION. 



aroused by a plot for a servile insurrection. 1 
In 1738 there was another attempt at servile 
insurrection, and the negroes were now esti- 
mated at 40,000. a Mr. Bancroft makes the 
number but little greater in 1754. Both the 
Carolinas meanwhile received large acces- 
sions of Irish and of French Protestants 
from Europe, of Puritans from New En- 
gland, and of Dutch from New York, so that 
in 1754 the white inhabitants of the two col- 
onies were estimated at twenty-two times 
the number stated for 1700. 

If we follow Mr. Bancroft's classification, 
and place Maryland with the middle colo- 
nies, we find this group in 1754 exceeding 
New England in the ratio nearly of five to 
four. Of the middle colonies, Pennsylvania 
had, in the sixty years since its settlement, 
become by far the most populous. 

New England, during the period we are 
considering, had increased nearly fivefold. 
Maine, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire 
had now considerable populations ; and the 
beginnings of a new State, though not to be 
reckoned among the immortal " Thirteen," 
had been made, in 1724, by the establish- 
ment of Fort Dummer, on the site of Brat- 
tleborough, within the present State of Ver- 
mont. 

It is natural that on the verge of the 
Seven Years' War, which broke the power 
of France on the American continent, the 
historian should pause to review the prog- 
ress of settlement ; and accordingly we find 
Mr. Bancroft summing up thus, for the year 
1754, the population of the several colonies : 

"Of persons of European ancestry perhaps 50,000 
dwelt in New Hampshire, 207,000 in Massachusetts, 
35,000 in Rhode Island, and 133,000 in Connecticut : 
in New England, therefore, 425,000 souls. 

" Of the middle colonies, New York may have had 
85,000 ; New Jersey, 73,000 ; Pennsylvania, with Dela- 
ware, 195,000 ; Maryland, 104,000 : in all not far from 

457,000 To Virginia may be assigned 168,000 white 

inhabitants ; to North Carolina scarcely more than 
70,000 ; to South Carolina, 40,000 ; to Georgia not more 
than 5000 : to the whole country south of the Potomac, 
283,000.... 

" Of persons of African lineage the home was chief- 
ly determined by climate. New Hampshire, Massa- 
chusetts, and Maine, may have had 3000 negroes ; 
Rhode Island, 4500; Connecticut, 3500: all New En- 
gland, therefore, about 11,000. New York alone had 
not far from 11,000; New Jersey about half that num- 
ber; Pennsylvania, with Delaware, 11,000; Maryland, 
44,000: the central colonies collectively, 71,000. In 
Virginia there were not less than 116,000 ; in North 



i Holmes, i. 547. 



= Holmes, ii. 10, 11. 



Carolina, perhaps more than 20,000; in South Car- 
olina, full 40,000; in Georgia, about 2000: so that 
the country south of the Potomac may have had 
178,000."' 

These estimates yield totals of 1,165,000 
whites and 260,000 negroes. 

1754-1790. 

Pitt's war with France ensued. In 1763 
his Most Christian Majesty by treaty relin- 
quished to England all his rights to terri- 
tory east of the Mississippi and north of 
thirty-one degrees north latitude. Popula- 
tion had gone on increasing all the time in 
spite of the war, but the triumphant con- 
clusion was instantly followed by an exten- 
sion of settlement in every direction. The 
presence of the French military posts in an 
unbroken chain from the Atlantic through 
the valleys of the St. Lawrence and the 
Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, and the 
fear of the Indian allies of the French, had 
repressed in a degree even the adventurous 
courage of the English-Americans. W T hen 
once this pressure was removed, popula- 
tion bounded forward with astonishing 
alacrity. 

On the extreme Northeast, in Maine, where 
settlement had been retarded by six succes- 
sive Indian wars, " old claims under ancient 
grants began now to be revived, and new 
grants to be solicited." 2 The counties of 
Cumberland and Lincoln were erected in 
the year following the rjeace. Settlements 
stretched unrestrained along the coast to- 
ward the Penobscot, and population soon 
became almost continuous, even to Nova 
Scotia. To the North, the New Hampshire 
side of the Upper Connecticut witnessed a 
rapid immigration ; while the other bank, 
contested then between New York and New 
Hampshire, became the scene of a petty 
warfare between rival patentees, possession 
and law being generally invoked against 
each other. Population also began to seek 
the borders of Lake Champlain, and to force 
its way through the forests to the lakes of 
Central New York. 

To the South again, Georgia and South 
Carolina were now increasing in population 
and extending their settlements w r ith unex- 
ampled rapidity. In 1752 the population 



i Hist. United States, iv. 127-129. 

* Hildreth, Hist. United States, ii. 510. 



WESTWARD EMIGRATION. 



219 



of Georgia had been computed at 9000. In 
1775 it was estimated to be 75,000. About 
the latter date the colony was divided into 
eight counties — four along the coast and 
four up the Savannah River. 

But it was to the West, between the par- 
allels which embraced the colonies of North 
Carolina and Virginia, and upon lands in- 
cluded within their charters, that the great- 
est movement in this period took place. 
Notwithstanding the exclusively agricul- 
tural character of the industry of these 
colonies, inviting a wide extension of pop- 
ulation, the Blue Ridge had been, so late as 
1731, the western boundary of settlement. 
From that time forward, however, settlers 
gradually penetrated the mountains north 
of the James River, and found homes in the 
valleys beyond, until in 1751-52 the further- 
most wave of population had reached the 
base of the Alleghanies, and here for a time 
was stayed. But the Virginians and North 
Carolinians of that day knew better what 
lay beyond that mountain barrier than did 
the British Board of Trade when they sent 
Captain John Smith up the Chickahominy 
to discover the Pacific Ocean. By the ex- 
plorations of Colonel Wood in 1654-64 sev- 
eral of the branches of the Ohio River had 
been made known, though for fifty years 
it still remained the general belief that the 
Alleghanies themselves were impassable. 
In 1714, however, Lieutenant - Governor 
Spottiswoode, of Virginia, led in person, 
"with great parade and solemnity," an ex- 
pedition for the discovery of a passage 
across the mountains, which was crowned 
with such complete success that Spottis- 
woode was hailed by the Virginians with 
acclamations " of grateful and, indeed, hy- 
perbolical praise, which exalted him to an 
approach to the glory of Hannibal." 1 

The statesmen of Virginia early saw that 
the long French line might be thrust through 
with fatal effect if settlements properly cov- 
ered with military force were pushed across 
the mountains. It was the attempt of Gov- 
ernor Dinwiddie to seize the junction of the 
Alleghany and Monongahela in 1754 which 
brought on the war which ended in the con- 
quest of the Ohio Valley. 

Yet even after the peace of 1763, which 

1 Grahame, iii. 69. 



gave all this country into the undisputed 
possession of England, subject only to Indi- 
an claims (and curiously enough, and in 
this connection importantly enough, it hap- 
pened that no Indian tribe at any time had 
title to the territory immediately west of 
Virginia, which subsequently became the 
State of Kentucky), the home government 
persistently discouraged emigration to the 
West ; and by proclamation of October 7, 
1763, " it was ordered that, except in Quebec 
and West Florida, no public lands should be 
taken up beyond the heads of the rivers inhich 
flotv into the Atlantic." Thus the Alleghanies 
were set as the boundary of American enter- 
prise ; and the valleys of the Ohio and the 
Mississippi were to be locked against the 
intrusion of the pioneer. 

But little did the pioneer reck of procla- 
mations. His axe and rifle were his patent, 
and, looking down on the richest soil of the 
world, he was not likely to be long hindered 
by minutes from the Board of Trade. 

Hardly was the proclamation issued when 
the banks of the Monongahela were occu- 
pied by emigrants from Pennsylvania, Mary- 
land, and Virginia. In 1768 James Robert- 
son planted his North Carolina colony on 
the Watauga, in the present State of Tennes- 
see, and soon the Clinch and Holston valleys 
experienced the influx of emigrants from 
across the mountains. 

In 1769 began the romantic exploits of 
Daniel Boone upon the "dark and bloody 
ground" later to be known as the State of 
Kentucky. Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, 
and Lexington appear to have been founded 
by 1776. In 1788 the settlement of Ohio 
was begun by the establishment of Marietta 
on the left bank of the Muskingum. In two 
years 20,000 persons were reported to have 
passed the Muskingum on their westward 
way. 1 

The surrender by France of the territory 
east of the Mississippi had brought within 
the jurisdiction of England in 1763 not a few 
settlements whose age, while it can not al- 
ways be precisely ascertained, gives them 
still most respectable standing among the 
present towns of the United States. 

There was Detroit, in the present State 
of Michigan, reported, though erroneously, 

1 Holmes's Annals, ii. 370. 



220 



GROWTH AND DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION. 



to contain in its immediate vicinity as many 
as 2500 Europeans, destined to become in the 
very year of the surrender the prime object 
of the famous " conspiracy of Pontiac." 

The non-Indian population within the 
present State of Illinois was, according to 
Mr. Bancroft, not more than 1358 persons, 
of whom more than 300 were Africans. 

Indiana had but one settlement, Vin- 
cennes, of nearly equal age with Detroit, 
with 400 to 500 inhabitants. 

To the loyalty of the people thus trans- 
ferred by the fortune of war, Mr. Jefferson 
bears the following testimony : 

" Having been Governor of Virginia when Vincennes 
and the other French settlements of that quarter sur- 
rendered to the arms of that State twenty-eight years 
ago, I have had a particular knowledge of their char- 
acter....! have ever considered them as sober, honest, 
and orderly citizens, submissive to the laws, and faith- 
ful to the nation of which they are a part."— To William 
M'lntosh, January 30, 1S08. 

Nor was the settlement of the newly ac- 
quired territory limited to the northern por- 
tions. President Stiles preserves account 
of extensive migrations in 1773 to reinforce 
the existing settlements on the Mississippi 
at and about Natchez. 

But while population was thus spreading 
over the vast territory opened up by the 
peace of 17G3, the older settlements, espe- 
cially at the South, 1 were also growing rap- 
idly, and even the war did not suffice to 
check the progress of population in com- 
munities where but a small proportion of 
the fertile lauds was yet taken up, and where 
every added man was added strength to the 
State. 2 

"From many returns and computations," 

1 Mr. Hildreth calls the years immediately succeed- 
ing 1763 " the golden age of Maryland, Virginia, and 
South Carolina." 

2 Our fathers very early set themselves to figuring 
out their coming greatness through this rapid increase 
of population. The works of Franklin and Jefferson 
abound in allusions to the growth of the past and pre- 
dictions of corresponding growth in the future. Mr. 
Jefferson especially delighted to dwell on the possibil- 
ities of increase. " A duplication in little more thar 
twenty-two years," he writes in his first annual mes- 
sage as President after the second census. "In fifty 
years more the United States alone," he writes to 
Humboldt in 1813, "will contain fifty millions of in- 
habitants." In 1815 he Btates it to Mr. Maury as forty 
millions in forty years, and in sixty years eighty mill- 
ions. The time is already up, but the eighty millions 
are not forth-coming. The truth is that no expecta- 
tion is so unreasonable respecting a geometrical ratio 
of increase as that it will continue. 



says Mr. Bancroft, "I deduce the annexed 
table as some approximation to exactness :" 



Year. 


Whites. 


Bl.i.-ks. 


Total. 


1750 


1,040,000 


220,000 


1,260,000 


1754 


1,165,000 


260,000 


1,425,000 


1760 


1,385,000 


310,000 


1,695,000 


1770 


1,850,000 


462,000 


2,312.000 


1780 


2,383,000 


562,000 


2,945,000 



At the first glance it will seem incredible 
that in the decade which bore almost the 
entire brunt of the Revolutionary struggle 
against England population should have 
held its own not only, but have made an 
advance of nearly thirty per cent. Yet 
much can be said in favor of this estimate 
for the period 1770-80. 1770-73 witnessed 
a rapid and continuous immigration, espe- 
cially from Ireland and Germany, which 
provided a great resource during the long- 
continued drain which followed in the years 
of war. In 1773 especially we have accounts 
of wholesale immigration from Ireland into 
Pennsylvania, New York, and the Carolinas. 1 
The outbreak of the Revolution and the 
union of the colonies, which, in 1776, declared 
themselves States, required that the popu- 
lation of each should be at least approxi- 
mately ascertained for the apportionment 
of the fiscal burdens of the war. The num- 
bers, as then settled, " exclusive of slaves at 
the South," Pitkin gives as follows : 

New Hampshire 2 102,000 Delaware 37,000 

Massachusetts... 352,000 Maryland 174,000 

Rhode Island. . . . 58,000 Virginia 300,000 

Connecticut 202,000 North Carolina . . 181,000 

New York 238,000 South Carolina . . 93,000 

New Jersey 138,000 Georgia 27,000 

Pennsylvania.... 341,000 

Total 2,243,000 

The slaves being then estimated at 500,000 
(ibid.), the total estimated population at this 
time was 2,750,000. In the Convention of 
1787, which framed the present Constitution 
of the United States, it became necessary to 
use the estimated population of each State 
for another purpose, namely, that of deter- 
mining provisionally its representation in 
Congress pending an actual enumeration. 
Mr. Curtis, in his History of the Constitution 3 



i Holmes's Annals, ii. 183. 

2 New Hampshire complained that her number was 
too high, and in 1782 caused an actual enumeration to 
be made, by which it appeared that the number of her 
inhabitants was only 82,000. Congress, however, re- 
fused to alter her proportion of taxes on that account. 
— Pitkin's Statistics. 

3 A statement differing from this slightly in respect 
to several of the States, and decidedly in respect to 



THE FIRST CENSUS. 



221 




(vol. ii. p. 168, 169), gives the following table 

as that " used by the Federal Convention :" 

New Hampshire 102,000 

Massachusetts! 360,000 

Rhode Island 58,000 

Connecticut 202,000 

New York' 238,000 

New Jersey 138,000 

Pennsylvania 360,000 

Delaware 3T,000 

Maryland, including three -fifths of 80,000 

negroes 218,000 

Virginia, 1 including three-fifths of 280,000 

negroes 420,000 

North Carolina, 1 including three- fifths of 

60,000 negroes 200,000 

South Carolina, including three- fifths of 

80,000 negroes 150,000 

Georgia, including three -fifths of 20,000 ne- 
groes 90,000 

2^573,000 

Add for negroes omitted 208,000 

Total estimated population 2,781,000 

Georgia and New Hampshire, is given in Elliott's De- 
bates (i. 194), as found among the papers of Mr. Briarly, 
a delegate to that convention. 

1 Massachusetts, it will he remembered, then com- 
prised the territory which in 1S20 became the State 
of Maine ; New York that which in 1791 became the 



1790-1870. 

The first census of the United States 
was taken in 1790, fourteen years after the 
Declaration of the Independence of the 
States, and determined the population to 
be 3,172,006 whites, aud 757,208 blacks. 

Pretty much as a matter of course, great 
disappointment was felt at the result, and 
dissatisfaction at the methods of enumera- 
tion was loudly expressed. Mr. Jefferson, 
then Secretary of State, in sending copies 
of the published tables to our representa- 
tives at foreign courts, was careful to im- 
press it on the minds of his correspondents 
that the returns fell far short of the truth, 
and even went so far as to supply the omis- 
sions which he assumed by entries " in red 
ink" (see letters to William Carmichael, Au- 
gust 24, 1791, and to William Short, August 

State of Vermont ; Virginia that which in 1792 became 
the State of Kentucky ; North Carolina that which in 
1796 became the State of Tennessee. 



222 



GROWTH AND DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION. 



29, 1791). The results of later censuses, 
however, substantially establish the accu- 
racy of the first enumeration, and show that 
the dissatisfaction was due to overstrained 
anticipations. The following table (antici- 
pating the formation of State governments 
in Maine, Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennes- 
see) exhibits the result by States : 



Delaware 59,096 

Maryland 319,72S 

Virginia 747,610 

North Carolina... 393,751 

South Carolina . . . 249,073 

Georgia 82,548 

Kentucky 73,677 

Tennessee 35,691 



Maine 96,540 

New Hampshire . . 141, 8S5 

Vermont 85,425 

Massachusetts 378,787 

Rhode Island 68,S25 

Connecticut 237,946 

New York 340,120 

New Jersey 1S4,139 

Pennsylvania 434,373 

The second map which we present exhib- 
its the areas actually covered by a popu- 
lation of two inhabitants or more to the 
square mile at each alternate decennial cen- 
sus. The deepest shading (No. 5) indicates 
the settlemeuts of 1790. The aggregate 
area covered by population at that time 
was 239,935 square miles, which, 1 with the 
population then returned, would yield an 
average of 16.4 inhabitants to the square 
mile. This inhabited area stretched from 
the thirty-first degree north latitude in the 
south of Georgia to the forty-fifth degree 
north latitude in Maine, while its extent in- 
land was comparatively insignificant. The 
following table shows the number of miles 
on each parallel of latitude occupied by 
population at each alternate decennial cen- 
sus, measuring from the Atlantic coast west- 
ward to the 100th meridian. 



Degree of 












North 


1790. 


1810. 


1830. 


1850. 


1870. 


Latitude. 












47 











79 


209 


46 








15 


50 


230 


45 


30 


392 


392 


437 


858 


44 


226 


279 


299 


404 


777 


43 


339 


425 


485 


816 


1137 


42 


234 


568 


691 


984 


1248 


41 


238 


471 


663 


1107 


1325 


40 


358 


584 


912 


1140 


1252 


39 


270 


565 


1038 


1043 


1224 


38 


425 


707 


871 


1032 


1193 


37 


344 


706 


797 


1018 


1134 


36 


462 


682 


878 


1057 


1057 


35 


384 


391 


961 


1030 


1030 


34 


302 


362 


707 


938 


938 


33 


175 


230 


554 


9S9 


1055 


32 


30 


227 


742 


929 


1008 


31 


10 


240 


634 


860 


991 


30 





150 


323 


725 


785 


29 











255 


372 


23 











80 


140 


27 














25 


26 














65 



1 Statistical A tlas of the United States, 1874 : article, 
"The Progress of the Nation." We shall, from this 
point forward, freely use the Statements made in that 
article without the affectation of an acknowledgment. 



Examining the figures for 1790, we find 
the average settlement inland, along the fif- 
teen degrees of latitude on which there was 
then population, to be but 255 miles, while 
if we exclude the forty-fifth and the thirty- 
first and thirty-second degrees, which were 
most scantily populated, we shall still have 
an extent inland of but 313 miles, one-half 
at least of which, the writer is disposed to 
believe, had been covered with population 1 
since 1763. 

We have said little of charters and con- 
stitutions, and have sought to carry forward 
our account of the growth of population in 
the American colonies without much regard 
to the greater or the smaller politics of the 
time. But one effect, of a political charac- 
ter, due to the geographical relations of the 
population just noted, fairly comes within 
the scope of this paper. It is that, by rea- 
son of the location of settlements coastwise, 
the tendency toward a union of the colonies 
under a common government had, from the 
first, been reduced to a miuimum. If, on 
the other hand, we imagine the colonies to 
have been originally planted on the Missis- 
sippi and its principal tributaries, the Red, 
Arkansas, Missouri, and Ohio, we can not but 
be struck with the reason, and almost the 
imperative necessity, for an early union, 
which would have been found in their geo- 
graphical relations alone. Especially as we 
recall how quickly the free navigation of 
the Mississippi became a vital issue with the 
first few thousands of pioneers who pushed 
across the Alleghanies after the peace of 
1763 to make their homes in the valley of 
the Ohio, how constantly ever after, until 
the final adjustment of the question, that 
region was embroiled by contests arising 
out of disputed rights, and how ready these 
sons of Massachusetts, of Virginia, and of 
Carolina were reputed to be to fling away 
even their allegiance before submitting to 
be " cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in," 
by the grasp of another sovereignty upon 
their only outlet to the sea, it becomes 
scarcely possible to believe that the thir- 
teen colonies, had they been planted in any 
order within the great Mississippi system, 
could, even under the tempering and con- 

1 That is, to the degree necessary to allow of its 
representation on this map, namely, with at least two 
inhabitants to the square mile. 



SEGREGATION OF THE COLONIES. 



223 



trolling supervision of the crown, have re- 
mained for so much as one human genera- 
tion at peace with each other without some 
common form of government representing 
their own free and perennial consent. War 
must, in spite of all the restraining influ- 
ence of the crown, have furnished the only 
relief for the stifling sensations of the inte- 
rior colonies, or else, as with English good 
sense and good feeling would have been 
more likely, some form of union for general 
purposes would at an early date have been 
resorted to. 

But the colonies were not planted upon 
the Mississippi, which for more than two hun- 
dred years after the discovery of the main- 
land remained, we can not say unknown, but 
avoided by immigration, its difficult ap- 
proaches and its tedious navigation below 
the Isle of Orleans giving it the unpromis- 
ing name of " Malbouchia." It was on the 
coast, from Georgia to Maine, that colonies 
were planted in the seventeenth century. 
Now the Atlantic slope is made up of scores 
of distinct river basins, within each of which 
colonies might have been planted in practi- 
cal independence of each other. As mat- 
ter of fact, the malignant force of circum- 
stances 1 and the more effectual ignorance 
and stupidity of the home government com- 
bined to involve the colonies in many dis- 
putes ; yet still it remained true that each 
colony had its own coast-line and harbors 
and its own water-courses, sufficient to en- 
able it to maintain its commuuication with 
the outer world without the leave of any 
other colony. Massachusetts and Connect- 
icut did, indeed, quarrel for a while (1647- 
50) over the dues levied at the mouth of 
the Connecticut River (Say brook) on goods 
destined for Springfield, and retaliatory 
measures were for a short time resorted *o. 
New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey 
might quarrel, as, indeed, they have, in a 
feeble way, even since the adoption of the 
Constitution, 2 over the navigation of the 

1 Such as the cutting into two of the Massachusetts 
and Connecticut grants by the Dutch occupation of 
New York. 

2 Over the matter of the exclusive right of certain 
patentees of New York to navigate the waters of New 
York with vessels propelled by steam. Mr. Webster 
summed up the situation as it existed in 1824 as fol- 
lows: "The North River shut up by a monopoly 
from New York ; the Sound interdicted by a penal law 



waters of New York Bay. Virginia and 
Maryland had cause of dispute, traditions 
of which survive even to our day, in the 
petty war of oyster-men over their conflict- 
ing rights upon the Chesapeake, Potomac, 
and Pocomoke ; and several of the colonies 
had reason to complain that their neighbors 
took advantage of superior power and bet- 
ter geographical location to tax their prod- 
ucts. 1 But in none of these, or other in- 
stances that might be cited, were the actu- 
al or possible injuries of a vital character, 
tending to destroy the existence, 2 or even in 
an appreciable degree to impair the growth, 
of the colonies suffering them. 

It is in this attitude of natural independ- 
ence that we find the explanation of the 
fact that no popular sentiment in favor of 
an American nationality appeared in the 
early days of our colonial history. Even 
the ever-dreaded hostility of the French 
and their Indian allies was insufficient to 
furnish a motive to union. Virginians were 
content to be Virginians, Carolinians to be 
Carolinians, New Yorkers to be New York- 
ers. None seemed to aspire to be Ameri- 
cans. The partial confederation of New En- 
gland in 1643, an occasional joint expedi- 
tion or contribution, 3 and tbe abortive con- 
vention at Albany in 1754 were all that came 
of the common needs and common dangers 
of the colonies, until the one overwhelming 
necessity of a common resistance to the 
wrongs of the mother country, which should 
have been the common protector, assembled 
the Continental Congress of 1774. 

THE EXTENSION OF SETTLEMENT SINCE 1790. 

Group No. 4 on the map already referred 



of Connecticut; reprisals authorized by New Jersey 
against citizens of New York."— Argument in "Gib- 
bons and Ogden." 

1 Virginia had taxed the tobacco of North Carolina ; 
Pennsylvania had taxed the products of Maryland, of 
New Jersey, and of Delaware.— Curtis, Hist. Const, i. 
290. 

2 Delaware would seem to afford an instance in con- 
tradiction of this remark. But Delaware originally 
formed a part of Pennsylvania, being known as " the 
lower counties on the Delaware." From 1703 it en- 
joyed a separate Legislature; but it continued to have 
the same Governor as Pennsylvania— a fact which 
generally sufficed to prevent that antagonism of in- 
terests which otherwise might have arisen from the 
geographical relations of the two colonies. 

3 Maryland was the most southern colony which 
contributed to the defense of New York in 1695.— 
Bancroft, iii. 34. 



224 



GROWTH AND DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION. 



to exhibits the settlements of 1810 ; group 
No. 3, those of 1830 ; group No. 2, those of 
1850 ; and group No. 1, those of 1870. The 
following table shows the areas which are 
thus represented on the map, reduced to 
figures, in square miles. For 1850 and 1870 
we have, however, for convenience of com- 
parison, added the settled areas west of the 
100th meridian, which are not on the map. 



Tear. 


Total Area of 
Settlement. 


Population. 


Average Density of 

Settlement. Persons 

to a square mile. 


1790 
1810 
1830 
1850 
1870 


239,935 
407,945 
632,717 
979,249 
1,272,239 


3,929,214 

7,239,881 
12,866,020 
23,191,876 
38,558,371 


16.4 
17.7 
20.3 
23.7 
30.2 



This table excludes the nearly eighteen 
hundred thousand square miles of territory 
belonging to the United States (without 
reckoning the area of Alaska), which have 
either no population at all, or else are so 
sparsely populated that the settlements can 
not be exhibited on the scale taken for our 
map. The following table shows the degrees 
of latitude and longitude within which the 
solid body of settlement was at each period 
comprised, the plan of constructing it being 
to exclude all patches of settlement, or even 
considerable tracts, which were separated 
from the main body by vacant spaces, leav- 
ing thus only the solid mass of continuous 
settlement reaching from the Atlantic west- 
ward to the frontier for the time being. 



Year. 


EXTENT OF CONTINUOUS SETTLEMENT. 


North Latitude. 


West Longitude. 


1790 
1810 

1830 
1850 
1870 


31° _^5° 
29° 30'— 45° 15' 
29° 15'— 46° 15' 
28° 30'^6° 30' 
27° 15'^7° 30' 


67°— 83° 
67°— 88° 30' 
67°— 95° 
67°— 99° 
67°— 99° 45' 



CITIES. 

The population of 1790 was very largely 
rural. Of the 226,085 square miles which 
were covered with population, 166,782 had 
between 2 and 18 inhabitants to the square 
mile ; 59,282 had between 18 and 45 ; and 
but 13,871 had over 45. 

Of cities of 8000 or more inhabitants, there 
were at this date but six : Philadelphia, with 
a population of 42,520 ; New York, with 
33,131; Boston, with 18,038; Charleston, 
with 16,359; Baltimore, with 13,503 ; Salem, 
with (in round numbers) 8000. 

Of the six cities named only three had 
been the first-chosen seats of population. 
Salem had been settled in 1628 in prefer- 



ence to Boston ; Calvert's company sought 
St. Mary's, and not Baltimore ; "Old Charles- 
town" had to be abandoned to found modern 
Charleston. 

Of the six, Philadelphia, though founded 
nearly sixty years after New York, early took 
the lead, remaining the chief city until near- 
ly 1810. As early as 1696 it is described as 
containing 1000 houses, mostly of brick, and 
doubtless all then as decorous in aspect, and 
appearing as incapable of being out of the 
way, as their successors at the present time. 
At 1750 the population of the city is put at 
13,000.' 

New York, which had grown out of a few 
trading huts on Manhattan Island, had come 
in 1677 to be a smart village of 350 houses, 
with perhaps 3000 inhabitants. In 1696 the 
number of houses had increased to 594. In 
1759 there were 2000 houses, with perhaps 
12,000 inhabitants. By the colonial census 
of 1773 the population was determined to 
be 21,363. 

Boston had a rapid growth at first, which 
was checked by the almost entire cessation 
of immigration about 1670. In 1700 1000 
houses are reported ; in 1765 the number 
had increased only to 1676, the number of 
inhabitants being 15,520. 

Baltimore had not been laid out until 
1729. It was incorporated 1745. It re- 
mained, says Hildreth, but a petty village 
for twenty years afterward (ii. 414). 

Of cities now noted, Providence, Portland, 
Albany, and Richmond were then smart 
towns. Newport, though past its greatest 
prosperity, was still a considerable place. 
Norfolk was coming to be known for its ex- 
port trade. Savannah was as yet of little 
account. It was described in 1754 as con- 
taining " about 150 houses, all wooden ones, 
very small, and mostly old." 2 The begin- 
nings of Detroit have already been spoken 
of. Mobile, New Orleans, and St. Louis 
were as yet foreign territory. Mobile was 
little more than a Spanish garrison. The 
site of New Orleans, a pestilential swamp, 
had been cleared in 1718 by the Mississip- 
pi Company, under " the reign of Law" in 
France. In 1769, after the transfer of Lou- 
isiana to Spain, New Orleans was found to 



1 European Settlements in America, ii. 254. 
a Hildreth, ii. 454. 



GROWTH OF CITIES. 



225 



contain 1801 whites, 99 free colored, 60 dom- 
iciliated Indians, 1225 slaves. 1 St. Louis 
had been founded in 1764 as the emporium 
for the fur trade of the Missouri and Mis- 
sissippi valleys. President Jefferson, writ- 
ing of it to Colonel (afterward President) 
Monroe, May 4, 1806, says, " St. Louis, where 
there is good society, both French and Amer- 
ican, a healthy climate, and the finest field 
in the United States for accpiiring prop- 
erty." 

The aggregate population of the six cities 
at 1790 was 131,472, being 3.4 per cent, of 
the total xiopulation of the country. There 
are now twenty-nine cities which have a 
larger population than the largest at 1790 ; 
226 cities and towns as large as Salem then 
was ; the aggregate city population of to- 
day is 8,071,875, being 20.9 per cent, of the 
total population. 

The following table shows the growth of 
the city system from 1790 to 1870 : 



THE CENTRE OF POPULATION. 

It has been said that the average extent 
inland of population at 1790 was 313 miles, 
if we exclude the three parallels then most 
scantily populated. If the density of popu- 
lation over the settled area had been every 
where uniform, the centre of population 1 
would have been easily found. But, in fact, 
so irregular was the settlement of the At- 
lantic slope, so far as it was occupied at all, 
that very elaborate calculations require to 
be made in order to ascertain even approxi- 
mately the point at which the population 
would, so to speak, have balanced. Entering 
into these calculations, we fiud the denser 
settlements immediately on the coast, and 
especially the sea-port cities, drawing the 
centre of population far to the east of the 
geographical centre of the then populated 
tract, and fixing it about twenty-three miles 
east of Baltimore. Since that date the cen- 
tre of population has moved a total distance 
of 399 miles, being, as nearly as possible, an 



Year. 






en 


IES BY CLASSES, ACCORDING TO SIZE. 






8UU0 
to 


12,000 

to 


ao.oou 

to 


40,000 
to 


75,000 
to 


125,000 
to 


250,000 

to 


500,000 
and over. 


Total. 




12,000. 


00.0(10. 


40,000. 


75,000. 


125,000. 


250,000. 


500,000. 




1790 


1 


3 


1 


1 










6 


1810 


4 


2 


3 




2 








11 


1830 


12 


7 


3 


1 


1 


2 






26 


1850 


36 


20 


14 


7 


3 


3 


i 


i 


S5 


1870 


92 


63 


39 


14 


8 


3 


5 


2 


226 



The next table exhibits the aggregate 
city population at each specified date, in 
comparison with the total population of the 
country : 



Year. 


Population of 
United States. 


Population of 
Cities. 


Inhabitants of Cities 

in each 100 of the total 

Population. 


1790 
1810 
1830 
1850 
1870 


3,929,214 

7,239,881 
12,866,020 
23,191,876 
38,558,371 


131,472 

356,920 

864,509 

2,897,586 

8,071,875 


3.4 
4.9 
6.7 
12.5 
20.9 



average of fifty miles every ten years. The 
following table exhibits the position, by 
latitude and longitude, of the centre of pop- 
ulation at the beginning of each decennial 
period, with its location approximately by 
reference to important towns, and indicates 
the number of miles which had been trav- 
ersed in the westward movement of the 
preceding decade: 















Year. 




POSITION OF CENTRE 




durintr preceding 
Decade. 


North Latitude. 


West Longitude. 


Appr 


oximate Location by important. Towns. 


1790 


39° 16.5' 


76° 11.2' 


23 miles E. of Baltimore. 




1800 


39° 16.1' 


76° 56.5' 


18 


' W. of Baltimore. 


41 miles. 


1810 


39° 11.5' 


77° 37.2' 


40 


' N. W. by W. of Washington. 


36 " 


1820 


39° 05.7' 


78° 33' 


16 


' N. of Woodstock. 


50 " 


1830 


38° 57.9' 


79° 16.9' 


19 


' W.S.W. of Moorefleld. 


39 " 


1840 


39° 02' 


80° 18' 


16 


' S. of Clarksburg. 


55 " 


1S50 


3S° 59' 


81° 19' 


23 


' S.E. of Parkersburg. 


55 " 


1860 


39° 00.4' 


82° 48.8' 


20 


' S. of Chillicotbe. 


81 " 


1870 


39° 12' 


83° 35.7' 


48 


' E. by N. of Cincinnati. 


42 " 












Total.. 399 " 



Speaking roundly, it may be said that at 
1790 one-thirtieth of the population was in 
cities ; at 1810, one-twentieth ; at 1830, one- 
sixteenth ; at 1860, one-eighth ; at 1870, one- 
fifth and more. 



i Bancroft, vi. 296. 
15 



1 By the phrase " centre of population" is common- 
ly intended the point at which equilibrium would be 
reached were the country taken as a plane surface, it- 
self without weight, but capable of sustaining weight, 
and loaded with its inhabitants, in number and posi- 
tion such as they are found at the period under con- 
sideration, the individuals being of equal gravity, and 
each consequently exerting pressure on the pivotal 
point proportioned to his distance therefrom. 



226 



GROWTH AND DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION, 



The tremendous leap from 1850 to 1860, 
eighty-one miles, is due to the sudden trans- 
fer of a considerable body of population 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, con- 
sequent on the gold discoveries, twelve in- 
dividuals in San Francisco exerting as 
much pressure at the pivotal point, say, the 
crossiug of the 83d meridian and the 39th 
parallel, as forty individuals in Boston. 

The third map exhibits to the eye the 
movement of population which is stated in 
figures in the foregoing table. 

THE ARITHMETICAL PROCESS OF THE 
NATIONAL GROWTH. 

The arithmetical process of the national 
growth has been so fully set forth by a 
score of writers on population that we shall 
give but little space to its exposition here. 
The table following exhibits the ratio of 
increase, by ten, twenty, and thirty year 
periods, from 1790 to 1870 : 



Year. 


INCREASE PER CENT. 


In Ten Years. 


In Twenty Years. 


In Thirty Years. 


1800 


35.1 






1810 


36.3 


84.2 




1820 


33.1 


81.5 


145.1 


1830 


33.5 


77.7 


142.3 


1840 


32.6 


7T.2 


135.8 


1850 


35.8 


80.2 


140.7 


1S60 


35.6 


84.2 


144.4 


18T0 


22.6 


06.2 


125.9 



THE GEOGRAPHICAL PROCESS OF THE 
NATIONAL GROWTH. 

We find in a recent review so good a gen- 
eralization of the process of our national 
growth geographically that we can not do 
better than quote it, premising that the de- 
scription has reference to a series of maps 
like No. 5 of the present series (following), 
one for each census of the United States, 
showing the location and density of popu- 
lation at each date by shades of the same 
color. The writer says : 

"The feature which this series of plates brings to 
view most strikingly is the constant tendency to the 
formation beyond the general frontier line of detached 
patches of color in localities favorable to population, 
at first of insignificant proportions, but increasing 
during each decade ; the subsequent projection of 
branches toward the main body, which itself seems to 
develop sympathetically in the direction of these out- 
lying masses ; the formation of a broad connecting 
band ; and finally the complete absorption of the out- 
lying groups by the advancing main body, which in 
the mean time has been deepening in tint simultane- 
ously with the extension of its area. The foregoing 
process, in continuous action, seems to be the normal 
law of growth of our population, and its operation 



can be distinctly discerned to-day in the feelers cau- 
tiously thrown out from the east along the lines of 
the Missouri, the Platte, and the Arkansas rivers to- 
ward the Rocky Mountain settlements in Colorado 
and New Mexico."! 

The process may perhaps be illustrated by 
supposing an overflow from one of the banks 
of a lake of a definite volume of water, the 
overflow then to cease. The ground beyond 
the bank may seem to be level, but the wa- 
ter quickly discovers a slight depression 
through the middle of the plain, and flows 
out along this as a channel until, sooner or 
later, it finds a shallow basin, into which it 
drains, leaving perhaps here and there a 
small pool along its former channel. 

Now let us suppose a second overflow to 
take place : the water pours as before into 
the interior basin, but that basin now be- 
gins to lose its original shape. By little 
and little, broad shallow tracts upon one 
side of it are covered with water, while on 
all the other sides narrow arms are stretch- 
ed out, marking certain natural channels 
whose depression below the general surface 
the eye perhaps could not detect ; and as 
we pass back along the path of the overflow 
to the lake we find the few pools become 
many. Now let a third overflow take place : 
new shallow expanses will be added to the 
original basin ; some of the arms will bo 
extended around to meet each other, em- 
bracing spaces which still remain dry ; new 
arms will be stretched out in new directions, 
and the channel by which the water over- 
flows from the lake will now stand full, and 
even begin to overflow its banks in turn, 
send out its arms, and annex broad shallow 
expanses of water on either hand. Still an- 
other overflow, and the whole land would 
lie under water, and the margin of the lake 
be carried clear across the plain and estab- 
lished, for the time at least, on the other 
side. 

Such we conceive to be the process by 
which the geographical extension of our 
population has taken place, and had a cen- 
sus been taken every two or three years, 
and the results carefully noted down, we 
do not doubt that this process would be 
shown in almost uninterrupted action from 
1776, or even from 1660, to the present 
time. 

1 International Review, Jan.-Feb., 1875, p. 133. 



GEOGRAPHICAL EXTENSION. 



227 




228 



GROWTH AND DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION. 



TEE PACIFIC COAST SETTLEMENTS. 

But while the description thus given of 
the formation of bodies of population out- 
side the general frontier and their ultimate 
absorption in the mass of settlement ap- 
plies with substantial accuracy even in such 
extreme cases as the Tennessee and Ken- 
tucky groups of 1790 and the Mobile and 
New Orleans groups of 1810, the settlements 
on the Pacific coast followed another course, 
and have never come within the scope of 
this law. 

The "Louisiana" which Jefferson pur- 
chased in 1803 embraced, as appears on our 
first map, not only a vast extent of territory 
on this side of the Rocky, or, as they were 
then known, the Stony, Mountains, but also 
the present Territories of Washington and 
Idaho and the State of Oregon beyond. 
There were then no white settlements in 
Oregon outside of the trading stations, nor 
was there any population worth regarding 
until the gold discoveries of 1848. 

In 1824-25, however, a strong effort was 
made in Congress to secure this territory 
as against the conflicting claims of Great 
Britain by both a military occupation and 
a political organization, settlement to be 
encouraged by grants of public lands. It 
is not our purpose to trace the history of 
this bill, which was lost in the Senate, but 
the course of debate elicited expressions of 
opinion from honorable members which are 
not without interest and instruction to us 
to-day. 

In the House, Mr. Smyth, of Virginia, com- 
bated the notion that the limits of " the fed- 
eration" could ever be safely extended be- 
yond the Stony Mountains. He conceived 
that the principle of union from mutual in- 
terests might bind together all those who 
should inhabit the Mississippi Valley, as 
their produce would all seek the same out- 
let. He would concede that the federation 
might ultimately be made to embrace " one 
or two tiers of States beyond the Mississip- 
pi," but, in his judgment, the federative sys- 
tem ought not to be extended further. 

In the Senate, Mr. Dickerson, of New Jer- 
sey, offered a slashing opposition to the bill. 
The project of a State upon the Pacific was 
an absurdity. " The distance that a mem- 
ber of Congress from this State of Oregon 
would be obliged to travel in coming to 



the seat of government and returning home 

would be 9200 miles If he should travel 

at the rate of thirty miles per day, it would 
require 306 days ; allow for Sundays, forty- 
four, it would amount to 350 days. This 
would allow the member a fortnight to rest 
himself at Washington before he should 

commence his journey home It would be 

more expeditious, however, to come by wa- 
ter round Cape Horn, or to pass through 
Behring Straits, round the north coast of 
this continent to Baffin Bay, thence through 
Davis Strait to the Atlantic, and so on to 
Washington. It is true, this passage is 
not yet discovered, except upon our maps, 
out it will be as soon as Oregon shall be a 
State:' 

Mr. Dickerson's geographical eloquence 
was too much for the friends of the bill, 
which, on his motion, was laid upon the 
table. 

About 1850, however, the United States 
government was brought to provide for four 
longitudinal bodies of settlement west of the 
100th meridian. But though these groups 
of population came at about the same time 
under the control of the United States, they 
were of widely different age and history. 
The easternmost (in the present Territories 
of New Mexico and Colorado, between the 
103d and 105th meridians) represented the 
old Spanish settlements on the Rio Grande, 
extending to its source in the Rocky Mount- 
ains, and containing about 50,000 whites, 
of very various degrees of whiteness, now 
brought by cession, as the result of the Mex- 
ican war, under the flag of the United States. 
The second line of settlement (in the present 
Territory of Utah, along the 112th meridian) 
was the result of the flight of the Mormons 
across the plains in 1847-48. The remain- 
ing two lines of settlement were drawn west 
of the Sierra Nevada, close by each other, 
being scarcely distant a degree in longitude, 
the one at the foot of the Sierra, the other 
at the base of the coast range. These set- 
tlements were the result of the gold discov- 
eries in California in 1848. Two years suf- 
ficed to fill the valleys of the Sacramento 
and San Joaquin and the Willamette with 
a population of 100,000 of all races and con- 
ditions of men. Though these two lines of 
settlement were in their general course dis- 
tinct, they were yet united by one broad 



THE POST-OFFICE. 



229 



band of population reaching from San Fran- 
cisco to Sacramento and Stockton. 

Such were the settlements west of the 
100th meridian in 1850. They then com- 
prised about 33,600 square miles, occupied 
by a population of an appreciable degree of 
density. Ten years later their population 
had risen to about 620,000, covering about 
100,000 square miles. In 1870 the popula- 
tion west of the 100th meridian had risen to 
a full million, covering about 120,000 square 
miles. Each of the four lines of settlement 
still remains distinct, though each has grown 
greatly since 1850. The easternmost now 
stretches from the Mexican border, across 
the whole extent of New Mexico and Colo- 
rado, into Wyoming, in a narrow, irregular 
fashion, embracing in all about 140,000 souls. 
The Utah group now extends from the north- 
ern border of Arizona, a little way across 
the northern boundary of Utah, into Idaho. 
The population, Saints and Gentiles, has now 
risen to 90,000. The two California groups 
have extended themselves longitudinally — 
the westernmost from the thirty-ninth de- 
gree of latitude south to the thirty-third ; 
the other from the thirty-fifth parallel, with 
but slight interruption, northward to Pu- 
get Sound. 

In addition to these four longitudinal 
belts of population there are at the present 
time perhaps 150 patches of settlements, 
comprising each from 100 to 300 souls, with 
a few of even greater importance, scattered 
over the face of the vast region west of the 
100th meridian. A little ingenuity and the 
use of a somewhat heroic method of treat- 
ment would undoubtedly suffice to refer 
nearly all of these to one or another of the 
seven longitudinal zones or chains of min- 
eral deposits 1 which are recognized by our 
explorers and geologists. 



1 This generalization was first made by Professor 
Blake, and has been more minutely brought out by 
Mr. Clarence King, as follows : 

" The Pacific coast ranges upon the west carry quick- 
silver, tin, and chromic iron. The next belt is that of 
the Sierra Nevada and Oregon Cascades, which upon 
their west slope bear two zones — a foot-hill chain of 
copper mines and a middle line of gold deposits. 
These gold veins and the resultant placer mines ex- 
tend far into Alaska, characterized by the occurrence 
of gold in quartz, by a small amount of that metal 
which is entangled in iron sulphurets, and by occupy- 
ing splits in the upturned metamorphic strata of the 
Jurassic age. Lying to the east of this zone, along 



THE POST-OFFICE. 

Perhaps no better illustration could be 
found of the increase of population and the 
extension of settlements than is afforded by 
the history of the Post-office in the United 
States. 

In 1692 a royal patent constituted Thomas 
Neale Postmaster-General of Virginia and 
other parts of North America. Holmes says 
that under Neale's patent nothing whatever 
resulted, on account of the "dispersed situ- 
ations of the inhabitants." 1 Hildreth says, 
" A colonial Post-office system, though of a 
very limited and imperfect character, was 
presently established under this patent." 2 
In 1695, says Bancroft, letters might be for- 
warded eight times a year from the Potomac 
to Philadelphia. 3 

In 1710 Parliament passed " an act for es- 
tablishing a General Post-office for all her 
Majesty's dominions." The Postmaster-Gen- 
eral was authorized to keep "one chief let- 
ter office in New York, and other chief of- 
fices at some convenient place or places in 
each of her Majesty's provinces or colonies 
in America." A line of posts was estab- 
lished from the Piscataqua to Philadelphia, 
" irregularly extended a few years after to 
Williamsburg, in Virginia, the post leaving y 
Philadelphia for the South as often as letters 
enough ivere lodged to pay the expense. The 
postal communication subsequently estab- 
lished with the Carolinas was still more ir- 
regular."* 

In 1753 Dr. Franklin was appointed Post- 
master-General 5 for America, and held the 
office till 1774. Of his administration of the 
office he writes in his autobiography : 

"The American office had hitherto never paid any 
thing to that of Britain Before I was displaced by a 

the east base of the Sierras, and stretching southward 
into Mexico, is a chain of silver mines, containing com- 
paratively little base metal, and frequently included 
in volcanic rocks. Through Middle Mexico, Arizona, 
Middle Nevada, and Central Idaho is another line of 
silver mines, mineralized with complicated association 
of the base metals, and more often occurring in older 
rocks. Through New Mexico, Utah, and Western 
Montana lies another zone, of argentiferous galena 
lodes. To the east, again, the New Mexico, Colora- 
do, Wyoming, and Montana gold belt is an extremely 
well defined and continuous chain of deposits." 

1 Annals, i. 444. 

2 Hist. United States, ii. 181, 182. 

3 Hist. United States, iii. 34. 
* Hildreth, ii. 263. 

6 At first jointly with William Hunter. 



230 



GEOWTH AND DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION. 



freak of the ministers, we had brought it to yield three 
times as much clear revenue to the crown as the Post- 
office of Ireland." 

In 1774 William Goddard, a printer, of Bal- 
timore, proposed a plan for a " Constitution- 
al American Post-office," and, after much 
agitation of the subject, a service was act- 
ually inaugurated under Goddard's manage- 
ment ; but it had brief continuance. 

After the outbreak in 1775 the colonies 
were for a time driven to their own individ- 
ual efforts for maintaining the Post-office. 1 
On the 26th of July, 1775, however, the Con- 
tinental Congress resolved that a Postmas- 
ter-General be appointed for the "United 
Colonies," who should hold his office at Phil- 
adelphia, where the Congress was sitting. 
We ask special attention to the phraseol- 
ogy of the resolution fixing the general 
scope of the postal service : 

"That a line of posts be appointed, under the direc- 
tion of the Postmaster-General,/rom Falmouth, in New 
England, to Savannah, in Georgia, with as many cross 
posts as he shall think Jit." 

The expression shows the situation of the 
population as stretched along the coast, 
with but little extent inland. 

In 1790 the number of post-offices in the 
United States was seventy-five ; the aggre- 
gate length of the post-roads, 1875 miles; 
the amount paid for transportation of the 
mails, $22,081 ; the gross postal revenues 
were $37,935, and the expenditures $32,140. 
Mails were conveyed but three times per 
week between New York and Boston in 
summer, and twice in winter, occupying five 
days in transit. 2 Only five mails per week 
were exchanged between New York and 
Philadelphia, requiring two days in each 
direction, the weight rarely, if ever, exceed- 
ing the capacity of horseback mails. The 
number of letters transported during 1790 
probably did not exceed 300,000, and the 

> The Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, May 
13, established a postal system, with routes from Cam- 
bridge to Georgetown, in Lincoln County, Maine ; to 
Haverhill; to Providence; to Woodstock (Connecti- 
cut) by way of Worcester ; and from Worcester, by 
way of Springfield, to Great, Barrington ; and to Fal- 
mouth, in Barnstable County. Fourteen post-offices 
were set up. New Hampshire, May 18, established an 
office at Portsmouth. In June, Rhode Island estab- 
lished post-routes and post-offices. 

2 In 1792 we find Mr. Jefferson, as Secretary of State, 
writing to Colonel Pickering respecting the practica- 
bility of sending the mails 100 miles a day. Op., iii. 344. 



annual transportation (counting every trip) 
was about 350,000 miles. In 1870 there were 
28,492 post-offices ; the length of post-roads 
was 231,232 miles; the amount paid for 
transportation was $10,884,653; the postal 
revenue was $19,772,220 ; the expenditures, 
$23,948,837. In 1870 the number of let- 
ters carried in the mails was not less than 
590,000,000, and the aggregate of distances 
traveled amounted to 97,024,996 miles. 1 In 
1870 the letter-carriers of Manchester, New 
Hampshire, delivered more letters than con- 
stituted the whole burden of the postal serv- 
ice in 1790. 

In 1835 the total steamboat transpor- 
tation of the mails aggregated 906,959 
miles, the railroad transportation, 270,504 
miles. 2 In 1850 the steamboat transporta- 
tion was 2,659,656 miles, the railroad trans- 
portation, 604,396. In 1870 the steamboat 
transportation had risen to 4,122,385 miles, 
the railroad transportation 3 to 47,551,970 
miles. 

The following table exhibits the growth 
of the postal system, by five-year intervals, 
from 1790 to 1870 : 





Number 


Length of 




Number 


Length of 


Year. 


of Post- 


Post-routea 


Year. 


of Post- 






officea. 


in Miles. 




offices. 


in Miles. 


1790 


75 


1,875 


1835 


10,770 


115,176 


1795 


453 


13,207 


1840 


13,468 


155,739 


1800 


903 


20,817 


1845 


14,183 


143,940 


1805 


1558 


31,070 


1850 


18,417 


17S.672 


1810 


2300* 


36,406 


1855 


24,410 


227,906 


1815 


3000 


43,748 


1860 


28,498 


240,594 


1820 


4500 


72,492 , 


1865 


20,550 5 


142,340 


1825 


5677 


94,052 


1870 


28,492 


231,232 


1830 


8450 


112,774 [ 









1 Postmaster-General's Report, 1870. 

8 Transportation by four -horse post-coaches and 
two-horse stages, 16,874,050 miles ; on horseback and 
in sulkies, 7,817,973 miles. 

3 We find General Jackson's Postmaster-Genera!, 
Amos Kendall, engaged in 1835 in the same warfare 
with the railroads which so enlisted the passions and 
the energies of Mr. Creswell. Mr. Kendall, in his re- 
port of that year, informs Congress that he does not 
propose to pay the exorbitant rates demanded by the 
companies. "He will sooner put post-coaches or 
mail-wagons on the old roads, and run them there 
until public opinion or the force of superior authority 
induces the associations which have been permitted to 
monopolize the means of speedy conveyance on their 
routes to abate their terms." 

4 This and the two following entries have much the 
appearance of guess-work, and are perhaps explained 
by the following somewhat remarkable expression oc- 
curring in the report of the Postmaster-General for 
1823: "As near as can be knoicn from the records of 
this department, there are about 5142 post-offices es- 
tablished. Means have been taken to ascertain the 
exact number." 

1 The reduction is explained by the war of secession. 



CONSTITUENTS OF OUR POPULATION. 



231 



THE CONSTITUENTS OF OUR POPULATION. 

It will have been noted that the result of 
the national enumeration at 1790 showed the 
proportion of whites to blacks to be a little 
more than five to one. The following table 
shows the number of parts in each 100 of 
the total population sustained by the col- 
ored element at each successive census un- 
der the Constitution, and, secondly, the de- 
cennial rate of increase within the colored 
element itself: 



Year. 


COLORED. 


Percentage of 
total Population. 


Percentage of 
Increase during 
preci ' Qg Decade. 


1790 
1800 
1810 
1820 
1S30 
1840 
1S50 
1860 
1ST0 


19.3 

18.9 

19 

18.4 

18.2 

16.8 

13.3 

14.1 

12.7 


32.32 
37.05 
28.58 
31.44 
23.40 
26.60 
22.07 
9.21 



The rapid falling off in the rate of increase 
from 1860 to 1870 is the feature of this table 
which will at once arrest attention. Un- 
fortunately we can not know how much of 
this is due to the effects of war from 1860 
to 1865, when a violent and unprepared 
emancipation was wrought, not so much by 
the proclamation of the Executive as by the 
operations of armies, drawing after them 
vast bodies of the blacks to be crowded into 
camps and cities, uninstructed and unpro- 
vided, to perish by disease and privations 
in uncounted thousands ; how much to the 
effects of emancipation upon habits of life, 
occupation, diet, and location during the pe- 
riod following the return of peace. Had 
Congress in a proper view of the prodigious 
change which had passed upon the United 
States, and of the especial need of statis- 
tical information for directing the recon- 
struction, social, political, and industrial, of 
the South, provided for a census in 1865, we 
should have been able to see just where and 
in what condition the war left this race, 
and where and how the state of peace took 
them up. But that opportunity has gone by. 
The number of colored persons counted 
in the census of 1870 was 4,880,009. Few 
of these were found north of the forty-first 
degree of latitude. 

OUR FOREIGN ELEMENTS. 

The statistics of the foreign elements in 
the United States are historically very in- 



complete. For only three censuses, 1850-70, 
has the " place of birth" been returned with 
enumeration. From the former of these 
dates backward to 1820 we have only the 
tables compiled from the passenger lists of 
vessels bringing immigrants — data notori- 
ously imperfect. Before 1820 we have only 
scraps of evidence on the subject. 

In one sense, substantially all the white 
inhabitants within the present United States 
were at one time foreigners. But in the 
days when the population was mainly re- 
cruited by immigration the word " foreign- 
er" was never applied to an Englishman, 
nor generally to a Scot or Welshman, nor 
always to an Irishman. Thus we find it re- 
corded of the Rhode Island Colony in 1680 : 
"We have lately had few or no new-comers, 
either of English, Scotch, Irish, or foreigner '8. m 

The population of the thirteen States was 
mainly composed of Englishmen. Mr. Ban- 
croft (vol. vii. 355) speaks of the colonies in 
1775 as inhabited by persons " one-fifth of 
whom had for their mother-tongue some 
other language than the English." The or- 
der in which other nationalities contributed 
to the numbers of that pppulation the same 
writer indicates as follows: "Intermixed 
with French, still more with Swedes, and 
yet more with Dutch and Germans." 

The French were mainly Protestant refu- 
gees. After the revocation of the Edict of 
Nantes, William III. dispatched to the colo- 
nies large numbers of those who had sought 
a home in England. A few of these came 
to Massachusetts, 2 where some of the most 
illustrious names of subsequent history speak 
of the virtues of the Huguenots. In 1690 a 
large number of these refugees were sent 
out to Virginia, and in the same year many 
arrived in Carolina. In 1698 another con- 
siderable body arrived in Virginia. Even 
prior to these dates the French had appear- 
ed in New York. "When the Protestant 
churches in Rochello were razed," says Mr. 
Bancroft (ii. 302), " the colonists of that city 
were gladly admitted, and the French Prot- 

J Chalmers, i. 282-2S4. 

2 Holmes cites an act of the Legislature of 1692 pro- 
hibiting any of the French nation to reside in any of 
the sea-ports or frontier towns within the province 
without license, the reason assigned for the rule being 
that with the French Protestants " many of a contrary 
religion and interest" had obtruded themselves. — An- 
nals of A merica, 1. 441. 



232 



GROWTH AND DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION. 



estants came in such numbers tliat the 
public documents were sometimes issued in 
French as well as in Dutch and English." 

The persons of Swedish stock referred to 
by Mr. Bancroft as found iu the colonies in 
1775 were largely the descendants of those 
who settled Delaware. Of these Mr. Ban- 
croft says, in another part of his history 
(ii. 297, 298): "The descendants of the col- 
onists, in the course of generations widely 
scattered and blended with emigrants of 
other lineage, constitute probably more than 
one part in two hundred of the present pop- 
ulation of our country. At the time of the 
surrender they did not much exceed seven 
hundred souls." The fecundity which Mr. 
Bancroft thus assigns these Swedes is only 
surpassed by that which Mr. Hildreth (i.267) 
assigns to the twenty-five thousand, or few- 
er, original emigrants into New England pri- 
or to 1640 — " a primitive stock from which 
has been derived not less, perhaps, than a 
fourth part of the present population of the 
United States." Mr. Hildreth must have 
formed his notions of the average capabili- 
ties of the early New Englanders from the 
contemplation of exceptional cases like that 
of Obadiah Holmes, the Anabaptist, who was 
publicly flogged about 1651, and is reputed to 
have had five thousand descendants in 1790. 

But of all the European nations outside 
the British Isles, "the chief migration," says 
Mr. Bancroft (i. 450), " was from that Ger- 
manic race most famed for love of personal 
independence." 

The commercial enterprise of Holland had 
already planted many thousands of her sub- 
jects in the "New Netherlands" when the 
dominion of the last of the colonies passed 
to England ; nor did Dutch or German emi- 
gration cease, but it rather increased, when 
New York lost scout, burgomaster, and sche- 
pens, to gain mayor, aldermen, and sheriff. 

We have said that South Carolina, in its 
earliest settlement, received accessions of 
Dutch both from New York and from Hol- 
land. Before the downfall of the power of 
Holland on the Continent the Dutch had 
also appeared in Connecticut, and for a time 
disputed with the English the sovereignty 
of the soil even to the Connecticut River, 
but their few colonists were overwhelmed 
by tin- rapid invasion of the English. 

To Pennsylvania the Germans resorted. 



until, in 1764, Durand, iu a report to Choi- 
seul, wrote that " Germans weary of subor- 
dination to England, and unwilling to serve 
under English officers, openly declared that 
Pennsylvania would one day be called Lit- 
tle Germany." " Like Pennsylvania and the 
Carolinas," says Mr. Hildreth of New York 
in 1749, "it contained a great admixture, 
but those of Dutch origin still constituted 
a majority." 

Of all the German states, the misfortunes 
of the Palatinate made it the largest con- 
tributor to the population of the New World. 
When Hunter came out in 1710 as Governor 
of New York, we find notice of his bringing 
with him 2700 of this unfortunate people. 
Large numbers of the Palatines settled also 
in Carolina, upon the Roanoke and Pamlico, 
and many were cut off by the Tuscaroras in 
the savage rising of 1712. " We shall soon 
have a German colony," wrote Logan of 
Pennsylvania in 1726, " so many thousands 
of Palatines are already in the country." 

Even after the adoption of the Constitu- 
tion, and the removal of the seat of govern- 
ment to the banks of the Potomac, we find a 
proposition seriously entertained for bring- 
ing over Germans to furnish the labor ljr 
building up Washington city. 1 

The Swiss also appeared in considerable 
force among the early settlers of America. 
Newbern (as we now write it), on the Neuse, 
speaks of old Bern, on the Aar. In 1730 
Swiss immigrants founded Purysburg, the 
first town on the Savannah ; and Grahame 
speaks of considerable accessions to the 
same State from the same source iu 1733. 

"Asylum for the oppressed," of all nations 
and all religions, as America had become, 
the Moravians found their way in large 
numbers to our shores. Of Oglethorpe's 
300 recruits in 1736 more than one-half were 
of this faith, to which their brethren who 
preceded them had already witnessed by 
raising their "Ebenezer" on the banks of 
the Savannah. Pennsylvania, however, was 
their chosen country of refuge during the 
eighteenth century. 

It will readily be believed that help in 
building up so many youthful colonies, from 
whatever quarter it came, was eagerly wel- 
comed by the English population, and that 

1 Washington's works, xii. 305, 306. 



BRITISH IMMIGRANTS. 



233 



foreigners were not long excluded from the 
full privileges of citizenship. The first co- 
lonial naturalization act of which we find 
notice was that of Maryland in 1066. Vir- 
ginia followed in 1671. Pennsylvania nat- 
uralized the Swedes, Finns, and Dutch of 
Delaware. Carolina nattiralized the French 
refugees she received in 1696. 

The English Privy Council was long trou- 
bled by the scope and effect given to the co- 
lonial acts of naturalization, by which aliens 
were vested with the power of exercising 
functions which they were disabled from 
performing by the Navigation Acts. At 
last, by act of Parliament in 1746, a uniform 
system of naturalization was established, on 
the basis of seven years' residence, an oath 
of allegiance, and profession of the " Prot- 
estant Christian faith." 

Of the inhabitants of the British Isles by 
far the largest contribution, next to that 
of England, was from Ireland. This immi- 
gration, though somewhat spasmodic, had 
reached a vast though indeterminate total 
before the Revolution. The Irish settled 
all the way from New Hampshire, where 
Londonderry was founded in 1719 by a col- 
ony of about 100 families from Ulster, to 
Carolina, where a colony of 500 arrived as 
early as 1715. 1 The author of European Set- 
tlements in America speaks of the population 
of Virginia in 1750-54 as " growing every 
day more numerous by the migration of the 
Irish, who, not succeeding so well in Penn- 
sylvania as the more industrious and frugal 
Germans, sell their lands in that province 
to the latter, and take up new ground in 
the remote counties of Virginia, Maryland, 
and North Carolina. 2 These," he adds, " are 
chiefly Presbyterians from the north of Ire- 
land, who in America are generally called 
the Scotch-Irish" (ii. 216). It is probably 
to some colony thus planted that Jefferson 
referred when he wrote (Op., vi. 485) of 
"the wild Irish who had gotten possession 
of the valley between the Blue Ridge and 
the North Mountains, forming a barrier over 
which none ventured to leap, aud could still 
less venture to settle among." 



1 A small colony under Fergnsson had preceded 
them, arriving as early as 1683. — Bancroft's Hist. 
United States, ii. 1T3. 

2 Especially in the northwestern counties. — Hildreth, 
ii. 416. 



But Pennsylvania was still the especial' 
centre of attraction to the Irish before the 
Revolution. In 1729 there was a large 
Irish migration to Pennsylvania. The years 
1771-73 appear also to have witnessed a 
wholesale movement of population from Ire- 
land, especially the northern counties, into 
this province. Of these large numbers found 
their way to the region of the Monongahela 
and the Alleghany, and formed the pioneers 
of a vast population in Western and South- 
western Pennsylvania. We get a lively im- 
pression of the importance of this element a 
little later, when we find in the letters of 
that vehement Federalist, Oliver Wolcott, 
Jun., the formidable "whisky insurrection" 
of 1794 attributed almost wholly to the Irish 
of Pittsburg and viciuity. Thus : " The 
Irishmen in that quarter have at length pro- 
ceeded to great extremities ;'" " Pennsyl- 
vania need not be envied her Irishmen," 2 
etc. They might be in a strange land, 
but in making war upon the excise they 
found no unfamiliar or uncongenial occu- 
pation. 

The Scotch were then, as they are now, 
every where, though not largely in New 
England, nor generally in colonies any 
where. 

In New Jersey, 3 Georgia, and North Caro- 
lina we find, perhaps, the most prominent 
mention of the Scotch as a distinct element 
of the population. One exception to the 
rule that the Scotch did not tend to settle 
in colonies was found in the case of High- 
land soldiers of the British army discharged 
from service in America. 

New York, as the only considerable State 
of the thirteen which was originally formed 
under any other flag than that of England, 
might be supposed to have possessed the lar- 
gest foreign element, proportionally, of all ; 
and, indeed, from the first, not only was New 
York "a city of the world," with a citizen- 
ship " chosen from the Belgic provinces and 
England, from France and Bohemia, from 
Germany and Switzerland, from Piedmont 
and the Italian Alps," 4 but the Hudson, from 

' Gibbs, Adm. Washington and Adams, i. 156. 

2 Gibbs, i. 15T. 

3 In 1686, in defending their charter, the proprietors 
of East Jersey urged that they had sent out several 
hundreds of persons from Scotland. 

* Bancroft, ii. 301. The Bohemians survive unto 
this day. 



234 



GROWTH AND DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION. 



the bay to Albany, was settled -with a most 
motley population. 

But Pennsylvania long disputed with New 
York the honor of having the most curious- 
ly and variously composed population, and 
at the date of the Revolution indisputably 
carried off the palm. Chalmers says that 
Penn found the banks of the Delaware in- 
habited by 3000 persons, Swedes, Dutch, Fin- 
landers, and English. Those he brought 
with him and drew after him were only 
more widely assorted. "The diversity of 
people, religions, nations, and languages," 
says the author of European Settlements, "here 
is prodigious. Upward of 250,000 people," is 
his summary for 1750, "half of whom are 
Germans, Swedes, or Dutch." 

At a little later date within the century 
General Washington wrote: "Pennsylvania 
is a large State, and from the policy of its 
founder, and especially from the great ce- 
lebrity of Philadelphia, has become the gen- 
eral receptacle of foreigners from all coun- 
tries and of all descriptions" (Op., xii. 324). 

The large accessions from other countries 
than England, received by the Southern 
colonies from Maryland to Georgia>, have al- 
ready been sufficiently noticed. The States 
which now represent these colonies are those 
which have fewest foreigners. 

On the other hand, of all the colonies, 
those of New England received the smallest 
proportional accessions from nationalities 
other than pure English, and earliest expe- 
rienced the cessation of immigration, even 
from England. 

"The policy of encouraging immigration 
from abroad," says Hildreth (ii. 312, 313), 
" which contributed so much to the rapid 
advancement of Pennsylvania and Carolina, 
never found favor in New England. Even 
the few Irish settlers at Londonderry be- 
came objects of jealousy." 

In 1796 we find Washington writing to Sir 
John Sinclair as follows (Op., xii. 323, 324) : 

"Their numbers are not augmented by foreign em- 
igrants; yet from their circumscribed limits, compact 
situation, and natural population, they are rilling the 
western parts of tbe State of New York and the coun- 
try on the Ohio with their own surplusage." 

It is to this long cessation of immigration 
into New England that Madison refers when, 
writing after the fourth census (1820), he 
says: 



"It is worth remarking that New England, which 
has sent out such a continued swarm to other parts of 
the Union for a number of years, has continued at the 
same time, as the census shows, to increase in popula- 
tion, although it is well known that it has received but 
comparatively few emigrants from any quarter" (Op., 
iii. 213). 

Of the immigration between 1790 and 1820 
we know little precisely. Dr. Seybert esti- 
mates the total arrivals at 250,000, but the 
very form of the estimate reveals the in- 
adequacy of the data from which it was 
constructed. With 1820 begins the record 
of arrivals at our ports. The following ta- 
ble shows the immigration for the period 
1820-50 : 



Year. 


Total. 


From From 
Germany. | British Isles. 


1820-30 
1830-40 
1840-50 


151,000 

599,000 

1,113,000 


8,000 
152,000 
435,000 


82,000 

283,000 

1,048,000 



With the seventh census begins our exact 
account of foreigners in the United States. 
From this it appears that of the total pop- 
ulation at 1850 nine and a half per cent, were 
of foreign birth, at 1860 thirteen per cent., 
at 1870 fourteen per cent. At the several 
dates named the several specified nationali- 
ties contributed as follows to the total for- 
eign population : 



Nationality. 


1850. 


18(50. 


1870. 




1'er cent. 
43.5 
26.4 
13.9 
6.7 

0.81 


fer cent. 

38.9 
30.8 
11.5 
6.0 

1.7 


Per cent. 1 

33.3 
30.4 ! 
11.2 | 
8.9 1 

4.4 J 






Swedes, Norwegians, and 





The foreign immigrants to the United States 
have placed themselves mainly between the 
thirty-eighth and the forty-sixth degrees of 
latitude. 1 The meridian of the western 
boundary of Pennsylvania divides this for- 
eign population into an eastern and a west- 
ern half. 



i The geographical relation of the foreign and col- 
ored elements of the population is complemental in a 
high degree. Taking the States of Delaware, Mary- 
land, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri as consti- 
tuting a central zone neutral to the two elements, we 
have the following numerical proportions for each 
1000 of the population : 

Colored. Foreign. 

Northern and Northwestern States 14 ... 197 

Central States 132 .. . 91 

Southern and Southwestern States 415 .. . 22 

Some of the foreign elements are themselves in turn 
complemental in their location. Thus two-thirds of 
the Germans are found west of Buffalo, two-thirds of 
the Irish east of it ; the Scandinavians are mainly west 
of Lake Michigan, the British Americans east of it. 



FECUNDITY OF FOEEIGN ELEMENTS. 



235 



103 101 89 97 95 



B7 AS S3 III 79 T7 75 7a 71 69 67 6S 




103 101 99 97 95 93 91 89 83 85 83 81 79 77 



75 73 71 




THE FECUNDITY OF THE FOREIGN ELEMENTS. 

In addition to the 5,500,000 foreigners 
residing in the United States, there are 
4,167,616 both of whose parents were foreign, 
786,388 more who had a foreign father and 
a native mother, 370,782 who had a native 
father and a foreign mother, and by conse- 
quence there are 5,324,786 who have one or 
both parents foreign. 

Very grave statistical blunders have been 
committed by some very pretentious writers 
on population, who have sought to establish 
the comparative sterility of the native white 
popul ation of North America. The follow- 
ing sentence, quoted from a paper read be- 
fore the British Association in 1856, contains 
in substance a doctrine which was for a long 
time generally accepted in Europe, and has 
even been repeated on this side the Atlantic : 

"From the general unfitness of the climate to the 
European constitution, coupled with the occasional 



pestilential visitations which occur in the healthier 
localities, on the whole, on an average of three or four 
generations, extinction of the European races in North 
America would be almost certain, if the communica- 
tion with Europe were entirely cut off." 

Our space would not serve for the discus- 
sion of this question did it require to be ar- 
gued at length ; but Dr. Edward Jarvis, of 
Massachusetts, has so completely exposed 1 
the successive mistakes in figures and falla- 
cies in reasoning by which this most dis- 
paraging conclusion 8 was reached, that it is 
only necessary to refer to the subject here 

i The Atlantic Monthly, April, 1872 . 

2 Mr. Frederick Kapp, formerly of New York, now 
of Germany, who has perhaps done more than any one 
else to give currency to these views in Europe, reached 
the conclusion that of the free population of 1850 but 
thirty-six per cent., and of that of 1860 but twenty- 
nine per cent, was American in the sense of being de- 
rived from inhabitants of the country at 1790. No re- 
sult on this subject has been too monstrous to receive 
credence from the press of Europe. 



236 



GROWTH AND DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION. 



iu order to assure our readers, who are liable 
at any time to meet statements of this char- 
acter floating through the press or stranded 
iu the proceedings of scientific associations, 
that there is not the shadow of a statistical 
reason for attributing to the native Ameri- 
can population prior to the war of secession 
a deficiency in reproductive vigor compared 
with any people that ever lived upon the 
face of the earth. 

INTERSTATE MIGRATION. 

It will have been observed that the early 
colonists did not wait for a common form 
of government before inaugurating that 
system of internal migration which has 
been one of the most marked features of 
our national history. Almost as if from 
love of change, they moved up and down 
the coast by turns, or from a half-settled 
East to a wholly unsettled West. We have 
already had so many occasions to notice 
these movements of population that under 
the present title we will speak only of those 
wholesale migrations which are revealed by 
the census since 1850, when the "place of 
birth" came first to be recorded. The Edin- 
burgh Review of July, 1854, so well sum- 
marizes the results of the seventh census in 
this respect that we condense the statement 
for insertion here. 

1. In the Free States the movement was 
generally due west — from New York, for 
instance, to Michigan and Wisconsin, and 
from Pennsylvania to Ohio. And so strong 
was this passion that the West itself sup- 
plied a population to the further West. 
Ohio had sent 215,000 to the three States 
beyond her ; Indiana had retained 120,000 
from Ohio, but had sent on 50,000 of her 
own ; Illinois had taken 95,000 from Ohio 
and Indiana, and given 7000 to Iowa. 

2. The migration from the central Slave 
States had followed the same general law 
of a westerly movement ; but it had taken 
also a partial northwest direction into the 
Free States. 

3. In the planting States the move- 
ment had been mostly within themselves, 
taking a southwesterly and westerly di- 
rection. 

4. The American-born population of Tex- 
as had come principally from the Slave 
States; that of California from the Free 



States ; that of the Territories more from 
the Free than from the Slave. 

The census of 1870 shows the internal 
movements of population to be not less but 
more wholesale and incessant than at 1850. 
Our fourth map shows where the natives of 
New York and of South Carolina severally 
were found within the United States at the 
date of enumeration. The reader will be 
struck by the conformity to the rules laid 
down by the Edinburgh reviewer in his 
Nos. 1 and 3. A map showing the habitat of 
the Kentucky-born population, which our 
space does not allow us to introduce, shows 
that this one of the former " central Slave 
States" still conforms in its emigrations to 
the rule laid down in No. 2. 

The following table shows by even thou- 
sands for each State at 1870 (1) the number 
of persons residing in the State who were 
born therein ; (2) the number residing in 
the State who were born in other States 
and Territories of the Union ; (3) the num- 
ber born in the State who were residing in 
other States or Territories. The figures on 
the left indicate the rank of the States in 
population. 



State. 



(1) 



(2) 



(3) 



Alabama 

Arkansas 

California.... 
Connecticut. . 
Delaware .... 

Florida 

Georgia 

Illinois 

Indiana 

Iowa 

Kansas 

Kentucky. . . . 

Louisiana 

Maine 

Maryland 
Massachusetts 

Michigan 

Minnesota . . . 
Mississippi. . . 

Missouri 

Nebraska 

Nevada 

New Hampshire 
New Jersey .... 

New York 

North Carolina. 

Ohio 

Oregon 

Pennsylvania . . 
Rhode Island . . 
South Carolina. 

Tennessee 

Texas 

Vermont 

Virginia > 

West Virginia/ 
Wisconsin 



744,000 

233,000 

170,000 

350,000 

95,000 

110,000 

1,034,000 

1,190,000 

1,049,000 

429,000 

63,000 

1,081,000 

502,000 

551,000 

630,000 

903,000 

' 507,000 

126,000 

564,000 

874,000 

19,000 

3,000 

242,000 

575,000 

2,988,000 

1,029,000 

1,842,000 

37,000 

2,727,000 

125,000 

679,000 

1,02S.(I,!0 

389,000 
244,000 

1,545,000 

450,000 



243,000 

247,000 

181,000 

73,000 

21,000 

73,000 

139,000 

835,000 

491,000 

561,000 

253,000 

177,000 

163,000 

27,000 

68,000 

201,000 

409,000 

153,000 

253,000 

625,000 

74,000 

20,000 

46,000 

142,000 

257,000 

40,000 

450,000 

42,000 

250,000 

37,000 

19,000 

212,000 

368,000 

40,000 

91,000 

240,000 



230,000 

55,000 

12,000 

137,000 

39,000 

15,000 

274,000 

290,000 

321,000 

89,000 

11,000 

403,000 

63,000 

149,000 

176,000 

244,000 

66,000 

13,000 

139,000 

171,000 

5,000 

2,000 

125,000 

149,000 

1,074,000 

307,000 

807,000 

6,000 

675,000 

45,000 

246,000 

404,000 

26,000 

177,000 

584,000 

97,000 



THE POPULATION OF 1870. 

The situs of the thirty-seven and a half 
millions of our people who at 1870 were 
west of the 100th meridian is shown sep- 



DENSITY OF POPULATION. 



237 



101 BO 97 95 93 91 B9 B7 85 B3 a 79 77 73 73 n 6P «7 US 




arately in our fifth map. The solid mass of 
continuous settlement here represented cov- 
ers more than 1,150,000 square miles, lyiug 
between 27° 15' and 47° 30' north latitude, 
and between 67° and 99° 45' west longi- 
tude. The average density of population 
over this vast tract is 32.7 inhabitants to 
the square mile. This population is, how- 
ever, shown not as an average, but in three 
degrees of density of wide range. 

Of the four great river systems, the At- 
lantic system, with 304,538 square miles, 
contains 14,207,453 inhabitants, or 46.6 to 
the square mile ; the northern lake system, 
with 185,339 square miles, 4,399,604 inhabit- 
ants, an average of 23.7 ; the Mississippi or 
Gulf system, with 1,683,303 square miles, 
19,111,804 inhabitants, an average of 11.3 ; 
the Pacific system, an average of but 0.98 
inhabitants to the square mile. 

Such is the story of our population, told 



with more figures of arithmetic than fig- 
ures of speech. Speculation on the future 
would here be alike impertinent and vain. 
Whether the writer who tells of the in- 
crease and territorial expansion of our popu- 
lation at the second centennial of independ- 
ence shall describe the settlement of six 
hundred thousand, cr twelve hundred thou- 
sand, or the whole of the vast domain yet 
uninhabited — whether the flag of the Union 
shall wave over fifty States and a hundred 
millions of people only, within our present 
borders, or over a territory co-extensive 
with the continent and populous as Eu- 
rope, may be left in all trustfulness with the 
Power that hath thus far guided the career 
of this young nation. As I write, my eye 
falls on the motto of Connecticut, lifted up 
first in a savage wilderness, and lifted up 
since in many a day of battle : Qui transtulit, 
sustinet. Yea, and will sustain. 



VIII. 



MONETARY DEVELOPMENT. 



EMIGRANTS are never of the capitalist 
class, while the great need of settlers 
in a new country is capital. All forms of 
capital are required, and the only question 
is what make-shift will do to-day, and 
what requirement can be postponed until 
the morrow. Value money is that form of 
capital which, under such circumstances, 
seems to be the most dispensable ; but it 
can not be disposed of, any more than a 
community could sell all its wagons, boats, 
scales, measures, and other tools of trans- 
portation and exchange, unless some sub- 
stitute is provided. Hence various substi- 
tutes are adopted whenever they can be 
devised, and the monetary history of the 
United States from the first colonization 
until now is a history of experiments with 
cheap substitutes for money. 

Barter currency wa3 adopted very gen- 
erally in the colonies from the first, rates 
at which goods should exchange being fixed 
by law. Taxes were collected in kind, and 
fees were established in barter. In New 
England the aborigines had a currency of 
beads made from clam shells (wampum or 
peag, or warnpuinpeag), which the whites 
adopted and used among themselves and 
with the Indians, the rates being fixed by 
X>rices demanded in wampum by the Indi- 
ans for furs, and by the prices which the 
furs would bring in England. Wampum 
became overabundant, depreciated, became 
broken, and was abolished as a nuisance 
about 1650. In 1652 a mint was established 
at Boston, which went on coining "pine- 
tree" coins for over thirty years, although, 
as the mint was illegal, its coins were all 
dated 1652 to conceal the continuance of its 
operations. The charge for minting was ex- 
orbitant, and the English mint law of 1663 
having made the importation and exporta- 
tion of coin free, and the law of 1666 hav- 
ing abolished all charge for coining, the 
Massachusetts mint law served to drive the 
precious metal away. The coins were call- 
ed shillings, etc., but were twenty-five per 
cent, below sterling of the same denomina- 



tion, giving par of silver 6s. 8d., New En- 
gland currency, per ounce. This became 
the standard, but the barter currency being 
still legal, the silver coins which were not 
exported (and there was a severe law against 
exportation) were all clipped. 1 

In 1704 a proclamation of Queen Anne 
fixed the rates of Spanish and other foreign 
coins for the colonies. The Spanish dollar, 
or piece of eight, was rated at 4s. 6(7. Hence 
sterling was changed into dollars at two- 
ninths of a dollar for a shilling, or f!4| for 
£1, which remained the "par" until Janu- 
ary 1, 1874. New England currency being 
twenty-five per cent, worse, £1 in New En- 
gland currency was $3 33. A Spanish dol- 
lar, or piece of eight, in New England cur- 
rency was 6s. 

In 1686 a bank was proposed in Massa- 
chusetts, but its history is obscure. In 
1690 paper notes were first issued by that 
colony to pay for an unfortunate expedition 
against Canada. 2 The issue was moderate 
at first, and canceled year by year. In 1704 
the redemption was postponed two years, 
and after that there was no stopping. Issues 
were made to pay the expenses of govern- 
ment, and other issues to loan on mortgage, 
carrying out the scheme for getting rich by 
printing and borrowing, which starts up ev- 
ery generation over again. There were spe- 
cial " hard times" in Massachusetts in 1715, 



1 A mint was established in Maryland in 1661, but 
nothing is known of its history. 

2 Among the authorities on the colonial currencies 
should be mentioned the following : Hutchinson's 
History of Massachusetts Bay (very intelligent and cor- 
rect on finance) ; Douglas's Summary (unequal, but val- 
uable) ; Holmes's A nnals. Other old histories are gen- 
erally occupied with other than financial interests. 
Arnold's Rhode Island takes full account of trade and 
finance. A pamphlet published at Boston in 1740, 
and republished in Lord Overstone's tracts, 1857, Dis- 
course concerning the Currencies of the British Planta- 
tions, is of great value. Special works are Pelt on 
Massachusetts currency, Bronson on Connecticut cur- 
rency, Hickox on New York currency, and the collec- 
tion in Phillips's Colonial and Continental Paper Cur- 
rencies. These last all pursue chiefly the antiquarian 
interest. Branson's is the only one which shows a 
knowledge of financial science. 



EARLY CONGRESSIONAL ACTION. 



239 



17-20, 1727, 1733, 1741, 1749. Rhode Island, 
Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey first 
issued bills in 1709 for the second expedi- 
tion to Canada. In 1714 New York issued 
£27,680 in bills of credit as a "back-pay 
grab." Pennsylvania first issued paper in 
1723. Franklin urged more issues, and wrote 
in favor of them. 1 Maryland issued bills in 
1734, to be redeemed in sterling in three 
payments, at fifteen, thirty, and forty-five 
years. These payments being discounted, 
exchange rose to 250. Virginia used to- 
bacco-warehouse receipts as currency until 
1755, when she issued paper, and pushed it 
to great excess. North Carolina was a very 
poor colony, and her currency was greatly 
depreciated, although not over £52,500 in 
1740. South Carolina issued for war pur- 
poses in 1702. Rice was a barter medium. 

The only colony which ever resumed was 
Massachusetts. In 1745 the New England 
colonies made an expedition against Cape 
Breton, and took Louisbourg. The issues to 
pay for this rose to £2,466,712, nominal value 
in New England currency, in Massachusetts 
alone. Parliament ransomed Cape Breton, 
and Massachusetts imported her share of 
the ransom in silver and copper, redeemed 
her notes at eleven for one, and became " the 
silver colony." In 1751 Parliament forbade 
legal-tender non-interest-bearing notes for 
New England, at the prayer of Massachu- 
setts, and in 1764 for all the colonies. Gold 
circulated by weight, not being legal tender 
until 1762, when a law was passed in Mas- 
sachusetts making it a tender at 2^-fZ. silver 
per grain. This was five per cent, more 
than it was worth, and silver being unjust- 
ly rated, was exported, and became scarce. 

Issues within the act of Parliament con- 
tinued to be made in the older colonies, 
and in 1775, when the representatives of 
the New England colonies met to prepare 
for war, Massachusetts agreed to allow their 
bills to circulate in her territory, because 
they had nothing else. 

The First Continental Congress met at 
Philadelphia September 5, 1774. Its first 
measures were not military, but renewed 
the commercial war which the colonies had 
tried before, which was believed in long 
afterward, but which always accomplished 

1 See vol. ii. of his works. 



harm to the enemy at the expense of ten- 
fold harm at home in local and class bicker- 
ings. Trade was thrown away just when 
wise policy dictated to keep it, and even 
fight for it. After December, 1774, nothing 
was to be imported from any part of the 
British Empire ; and after September, 1775, 
nothing was to be exported to the same. 
English goods were needed for the army, 
and came by way of the European conti- 
nent and the West Indies ; and lumber and 
tobacco went out the same way. 

The Second Congress, May 10, 1775, set 
about making war, but it had no power to 
tax, and therefore no power to borrow. New 
York proposed bills of credit of the old kind, 
to be redeemed by taxes, and this plan was 
adopted. The first issue was ordered June 
23, 1775— promises to pay 2,000,000 Spanish 
dollars. The issues were apportioned among 
the colonies on an estimate of population, 
and they were called upon to redeem the 
quotas assigned them by taxes. Rhode Isl- 
and, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire 
alone did this entirely ; New York, Pennsyl- 
vania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia 
did so in part. The issues went on, how- 
ever, and in January, 1777, the depreciation 
began, although it was not admitted by 
Congress until September. 1 

During 1777 all means of coercion by pub- 
lic officers and private committees were used 
to enforce the legal-tender character of the 
bills and to keep down prices. Some crimes 
were perpetrated in the name of liberty in 
this connection. In September, 1779, the is- 
sues were $160,000,000, and Congress prom- 
ised that they should not exceed $200,000,000. 
The depreciation was twenty-eight for one 
(silver, 2800). In March, 1780, silver was at 
6500. a Congress recognized a depreciation 
of forty for one, and recommended the re- 
peal of all tender laws, and issued six-year 
six per cent, notes. The Register of the 

1 Monographs on the Continental currency have 
been published by Henry Phillips, 1866, and J. W. 
Schuckers, 1874. See also the article in Harper's Mag- 
azine for March, 1S63. On the social effects, see Pe- 
latiah Webster's Essays, 1791. He gives the deprecia- 
tion from a merchant's books. Another table is given 
in Niles's Register, November 23, 1833. 

2 In 1780 and 1781 an officer's mess bill included sug- 
ar at $14, $16, and $18 per pound ; twist, $10 per yard ; 
three brushes and a blackball, $95; a black silk hand- 
kerchief, $75; eggs, $12 per dozen.— Niles's Register, 
August 5, 1S26. 



240 



MONETARY DEVELOPMENT. 



Treasury made a report to Congress in 1828/ 
in which he put the suni of the issues at 



says $200,000,000/ and he puts the value at 
$36,000,000 in specie. He estimated the cost 
of the war at $140,000,000. Another state- 
ment from a Treasury report of 1790 gives 
0357,400,000 old tenor and $2,000,000 new 
tenor. These were partly re-issues. The 
same report estimates the cost of the war 
at $135,100,000 in specie. 3 In fact, as John 
Adams wrote to Niles, 4 the history of the 
Revolution [especially of its finances] is lost 
beyond recovery. The hills went on dej)re- 
ciating, being really only negotiable paper, 
until the spring of 1781, when Morris took 
charge of the finances on condition that he 
might conduct them in specie. Then the 
notes became waste paper. Some were re- 
deemed at one hundred for one in Hamil- 
ton's funding scheme. These notes were a 
greater obstacle to independence than the 
British arms; so much so that the enemy 
counterfeited them as a war measure. The 
French money was a greater aid to inde- 
pendence tban the French fleets and forces. 
After the paper money had exbausted the 
patience of the people, Congress had to col- 
lect taxes in kind to supply tbe army. It 
could not have been worse off for money at 
the outset, and would have had enthusiasm 
to help. The miseries of those days were 
enhanced by the failure of the crops of 1779 
and 1780. 

The war was now carried on by loans from 
France, Holland, and Spain, which were ob- 
tained on French credit. Specie brought by 
the French and English came into circula- 
tion as soon as the paper was dropped, and 
trade with the English was winked at be- 
cause specie was obtained by it. So much 
for non-intercourse. 

In 1780 a compauy of gentlemen in Phila- 
delphia took government bills of exchange, 
and issued notes to purchase supplies for 
the army. December 31, 1781, they were 
incorporated by resolution as the Bank of 
North America, Congress having finally or- 
ganized, November 1, under the Articles of 



1 Twentieth Congress, First Session, State Paper 107. 
a Works, is.. 259. 

3 Pitkin, A Statistical View, etc. (New Haven, 1835), 
p. 27. 
* Register, January 18, 1817. 



Confederation. The validity of this act be- 
ing questioned, the bank obtained a charter 
from Pennsylvania in 1783 for ten years, 
with a monopoly ; capital, $400,000. In 1785 
the State charter was repealed, on account 
of political and business jealousy. In 1787 it 
was renewed, without the monopoly. This 
was the first bank which issued convertible 
notes. It was of great use as a fiscal agent 
of the government, and very successful in 
its operations. Gouge says that it put on 
false pretenses of strength, but its history 
is so obscure that it is impossible to verify 
or refute these charges. 

The peace found the finances of the Con- 
federation and of the States in confusion. 
The Confederation was a shadow which no 
longer had dignity. It could not collect 
revenue or adjust its accounts, which were 
found in inextricable confusion, showing 
recklessness and carelessness, or worse, as a 
result of the numerous boards and officers 
among whom the responsibility had been 
divided. The States were likewise strug- 
gling with paper issues, which they retired 
by taxes, heavy in nominal amount, but 
small in value. In Massachusetts Daniel 
Shays led a body of armed men to Worces- 
ter, and from there to Springfield, to pre- 
vent the court from sitting. This body was 
dispersed by force, but leniently treated. 

In the same year (1786) 1 Rhode Island is- 
sued paper, as a measure of bankruptcy, with 
a stringent tender law. In 1789 the paper 
was at fifteen for one, and the State debt 
had been called in, and either paid in this 
currency or forfeited. Then the assump- 
tion by the general government being as- 
sured, the State stocks were returned to the 
holders who had been paid off, and in 1791 
and 1795 they all participated in the stocks 
allotted to the State. 2 

The war-protected industries were now 
prostrated. Commerce was restricted by 
the English navigation laws from its old 
path to the British West Indies, contrary to 

1 In a speech in the Senate, March 24, 183S, Judge 
White, of Tennessee, described the currency of " Frank- 
lin" (East Tennessee and West North Carolina) at this 
time as consisting of raccoon-skins. Counterfeiting 
consisted in attaching raccoons' tails to opossums' 
skins. The collectors practiced this fraud on the 
Treasury. 

2 Arnold's Rhode Island, ii.,at the end. Richmond, 
The Revolutionary Debt repudiated by Rhode Island. 



THE NATIONAL BANK. 



241 



Pitt's policy. 1 The commercial treaty pro- 
posed by Adams in 1785 was refused, and so 
both from within and without the necessity 
of union and nationality was enforced. 

The first measure of Congress was for tax- 
ation. The act of July 4, 1789, specified pro- 
tection as one of its objects. It laid duties 
of five per cent., fifty cents per ton on for- 
eign ships, and ten per cent, discriminating 
duty. Thus the United States failed to take 
the enlightened position on foreign trade 
which consistency with their other doctrines 
seemed to prescribe. Other acts followed 
on an average every other year for the next 
thirty years, by which the duties were in- 
creased and extended. 

September 2, 1789, the Treasury Depart- 
ment was established, 2 and Alexander Ham- 
ilton was appointed Secretary. He made a 
report on the finances January 14, 1790. The 
Confederate debt was $42,000,000 domestic 
and $11,000,000 foreign, and the debt of the 
States $25,000,000. The Confederate domes- 
tic debt, including officers' half-pay commu- 
tation (a very unpopular thing), was fund- 
ed at par, the market price being 15. The 
State debts were assumed, and funded 
against strong opposition, the location of 
the capital on the Potomac being assured in 
order to gain the consent of Virginia. Pen- 
sions and the funding of crops of exchequer 
bills had been two great abuses in England 
for a century, and were regarded with (bread 
here. 

Hamilton next proposed a national bank, 
which was established by act of March 3, 
1791, with a capital of $10,000,000, $8,000,000 
subscribed by individuals (one-quarter in 
specie, three - quarters in United States 
stock), and $2,000,000 by government. Its 
charter was for twenty years. It issued no 
notes under $10. Eight or ten years later 
the government sold its stock for twenty- 
five, twenty, and forty-five premium. A 
bubble speculation followed the founding 
of the bank. 3 

1 Pitkin, 189. 

3 A full history of the finances would include ton- 
nage, post-office, and tariff. These, however, are ex- 
cluded, except in cases where they affect the finances 
generally, from the present account. The only attempt 
to deal thoroughly with the financial history of the 
United States is Von Hock's, Die Finanzen und die Fi- 
nanzgeschichte der Ver. St. (Cotta, Stuttgart, 1867.) 

3 Niles's Register, May 9, 1835. 
16 



March 3, 1791, an excise was laid on spir- 
its, wbich led to a rebellion in Pennsylvania 
in 1794. In 1794 other direct taxes were 
laid, and in 1797 stamp taxes. July 14, 
1798, direct taxes were apportioned on land, 
houses, aud slaves. These taxes were all 
repealed in 1802. 

Questions of coinage were taken up as 
early as 1781. January 15, 1782, Robert 
Morris made a report (said to have been 
prepared by Gouverneur Morris) proposing 
a coinage. 1 July 6, 1785, the "dollar" was 
adopted. August 8, 1786, a mint law was 
passed, which was modified October 16, 1786. 
During 1790 both Hamilton and Jefferson 2 
prepared papers on coinage, and September 
2, 1792, the mint law was approved. Silver 
was first coined in 1794, and gold in 1795. 
The silver dollar was to weigh 371.25 grains 
pare metal, and the gold dollar 24.75 grains 
pure metal, thus rating tbe metals as 15 to 
1. Silver was to gold in England as 15.2 to 
1, and here it was probably as 15.5 to 1. 
Little gold circulated here before 1820, and 
after that none. The silver dollar having 
less value than the gold dollar, was the only 
one which debtors paid. 

The calamity of Europe in the wars from 
1791 to 1815 was the opportunity of Amer- 
ica. It could not be enjoyed without expe- 
riencing the usual fortune of neutrals, nor 
without in its final results showing that the 
best gain of a nation comes not from the 
quarrels of its neighbors, but from their 
peace and prosperity. We were led to try 
another commercial war, and finally to un- 
dertake actual hostilities "for free trade" 
(i. e., of neutrals during war) "and sailors' 
rights," being forced to this by votes from 
south of the Delaware, while the ships and 
sailors in the North and East asked only to 
take their own risks. April 14, 1814, the re- 
strictive acts were finally repealed. Daniel 
Webster characterized the whole system in 
a sentence whsn he said it was " pernicious 
as to ourselves, and imbecile as to foreign 
nations." 3 The idea was by withholding 
trade to get a consideration in hand, viz., 
the promise to restore it, and then to offer 
this to either belligerent to induce him to 

1 Sparks's Diplomatic Correspondence, xii. 81. Amer- 
ican State Papers, vii. 101. 
3 American State Papers, vii. 105; xx. 13. 
3 Speech in the House, April 6, 1S14. 



242 



MONETARY DEVELOPMENT. 



relax his hostile regulations. Mr. Canning 
treated this with thinly veiled contempt. 
His position was, If it is a threat, I do not 
notice it ; if it is something to sell, I decline 
to buy. 

The embargo and war had " encouraged 
domestic industry," and had come to be con- 
sidered by some as beneficent forces. Com- 
merce had developed in an unexampled 
manner. The customs revenue fluctuated 
greatly, but rose from $3,400,000 in 1792 to 
$13,300,000 in 1811, actual receipts, long 
credit being given from the time of importa- 
tion. Lands figure as a source of income 
from 1796; $21,000,000 were due on arrears 
(credit being given) in 1820, 1 of which 
$14,900,000 were canceled before 1830 by 
surrendering lands. The Post-office was es- 
tablished May 8, 1794. A single letter cost 
six cents for thirty miles ; over 450 miles, 
twenty-five cents. Between 1794 and 1830 
the Post-office produced revenue except in 
1808, 1820, 1821, 1822, 1823, 1828, 1829, 1830. 2 
Between 1837 and 1874 it produced revenue 
only in 1837, 1848-1851, and 1865. 3 

January 1, 1791, the foreign debt was 
$12,800,000 ; the domestic debt, $62,600,000 ; 
total, $75,400,000. The act of August 4, 
1790, set apart the surplus revenue from du- 
ties to pay the debt. The act of May 8, 
1792, appropriated the revenue from lands 
to that purpose. The act of March 3, 1795, 
increased this fund, and named it the " sink- 
ing fund." The act of April 29, 1802, raised 
the sinking fund to $7,300,000 per annum. 
Two acts of November 10, 1803, raised loans 
of $13,000,000 to pay for Louisiana, and in- 
creased the sinking fund to $8,000,000 per 
annum. By the treaty of January 8, 1802, 
in fulfillment of section six of Jay's treaty, 
the United States agreed to pay £600,000 
(at $4 44) to discharge ante-Revolutionary 
debts of Americans to Englishmen. The 
foreign debt increased until 1795, but was 
extinguished in 1810. The domestic debt 
increased until 1801. The Louisiana pur- 
chase carried it to its maximum in 1804 
(January 1, total, $86,400,000). It was re- 
duced to $39,000,000 September 30, 1815.* 

A bankruptcy law was passed April 4, 
1800, but it was repealed December 19, 1803. 

1 Nilcs\* Register, February 5, 1820. 

* Pitkin, 33S. 3 Postmaster-General's Report, 1874. 

4 Treasury Report, 1815. 



The following table shows the develop- 
ment of banking, 1 the Bank of the United 
States being omitted : 



Year. | No. 


Capital. 


Cirrulntion. | Specie. 


1791 3 

Jan. 1,1811 88 
" 1815 208 


$2,000,000 
42,600,000 
82,200,000 


$22,700,000 
45,500,000 


$9,600,000 

17,0110,000 



Banks at this time were political engines. 
Niles often says that the old United States 
Bank gave favors only to black -cockade 
Federalists in and after 1798. Pitkin says 
that bank was Federalist, and finds it natu- 
ral that the Jefferson ian Democrats would 
not recharter it. McDuffie 2 repeats the as- 
sertion of political character in the old 
bank. Clay said that its stock was largely 
held by foreigners and noblemen, 3 which 
proves that it brought capital here which, 
at that day, would not otherwise have come. 
The charter expired March 3, 1811. The re- 
charter was lost in the House, January 24, 
by one vote, and in the Senate, February 20, 
by the casting-vote of the Vice-President. 
The bank closed up its affairs, and paid 
back its capital at 108£. 4 A large number 
of State banks at once sprang up. February 
12, 1820, Secretary Crawford estimated the 
paper in circulation in 1813 at $62,000,000, 
and the specie at $8,000,000 ; the paper in 
1816 at $99,000,000, and the specie at 
$11,000,000. For the latter year Gallatin 
estimated the banks at 246, with $89,800,000 
capital, $68,000,000 circulation, $19,000,000 
specie. 5 

Duties in 1804 were twelve and a half, fif- 
teen, and twenty per cent. The " Mediter- 
ranean Fund" was then raised by addition 
of two and a half per cent. April 3, 1812, in 
preparation for war, an embargo was laid 
for ninety days. The exportation of spe- 
cie was forbidden, all duties were doubled, 

1 Gallatin, Considerations on the Currency and Bank- 
ing System of the United States (Carey and Lea, Phila- 
delphia, 1831). Others give four banks in 1789, count- 
ing one in Maryland. 

a Report on United States Bank, April 13, 1830. 

3 Clay's report against the first bank (Senate, March 
2, 1S11) would have made a good Jackson document 
in 1832. 

* Pitkin, 421. The last dividend was in 1834 (Xiles's 
Register, September 13, 1S34). 

s The best account of this period is given by Will- 
iam Gouge, History of Paper Money and Banking 
(Philadelphia, 1833). Historically very correct and 
trustworthy, but theoretically marred by indiscrim- 
inate hostility to banks. See also Condy Raguet's 
Currency and Banking, 1840, Appendix II. 



WAR DEBT OF 1812. 



243 



an additional duty of ten per cent, was 
laid ou foreign ships, arid a tonnage duty of 
$1 50. This made the duties twenty-seven 
and a half, thirty-two and a half, and forty- 
two and a half per cent. The Mediterra- 
nean Fund expired in 1815, and the duties 
were twenty-five, thirty, and forty per cent, 
until July, 1816. July 22, 1813, a direct tax 
of $3,000,000 was laid. July 24 excise I axes 
and licenses were laid, which were extended 
by acts of January 18 and February 27, 1815, 
but an income tax was defeated January 18, 
1815. Another direct tax of $0,000,000 was 
also laid. On December 23, 1814, postage 
was raised to twelve cents for one sheet less 
than forty miles ; this was repealed Febru- 
ary 1, 1816. The internal taxes were rerjeal- 
ed in 1817. 

The loans contracted were : 



April, 1814 ; the banks of the District dur- 
ing the invasion, August 27 ; those of Phil- 
adelphia, August 30, 1814 ; those of the Mid- 
dle and Southern States, within a fortnight 
later ; those of Ohio and Kentucky paid spe- 
cie until January 1, 1815; the only one in 
Tennessee went on until July or August, 
1815 ; a few in Maine stopped early in 1814 ; 
the rest in New England did not suspend 
at all. 1 Banks now multiplied faster than 
ever, and the old ones increased their is- 
sues. The notes required elaborate quota- 
tions, and brokers had a rich harvest in ne- 
gotiating them. Mles's Register from 1814 
to 1820 is filled with complaints and objur- 
gations about the "shavings." The Secre- 
tary of the Treasury found the greatest em- 
barrassment from this state of things. The 
New England people paid all their dues to 



Date of Act. 1 Interest. 


Amount authorized. 


Amount issued. 


Rate. 


March 14, 1812 

August 2, 1813 

March 24, 1*14 

March 3, 1815 (for funding interest- 
bearing Treasury notes) 

February 24, 1S15 (f<*r funding non- 
interest-bearing Treasury noles) 


6 
6 
6 
6 


111,000,000 

16,000,000 

1,500,000 

25,000,000 

12,000,000 


$7,860,500 
18,109,377 
8,498,581 
15,661,81S 

9,745,745 -j 
3,268,949 -j 


Par. 

SS 

80 

90 to par in 

Treasury notes. 

Par in Treasury 

notes. 






163,144,972 









Five and two-fifths per cent. Treasury notes outstanding September 30, 1S15 $14,686,600 

Non-interest-bearing Treasury notes, about 1,500,000 

Temporary loans 1,150,000 

Total cost of the war, ascertained to September 30, 1815, about 80,500,000 



These items, with the temporary loans, 
made the debt for the war $80,500,000, and 
the total public debt, September 30, 1815, 
$119,600,000. » 

These loans were contracted at 80-90 in 
paper, depreciated twenty per cent., and 
after 1814 all the income of the government 
was in the same paper. 2 

March 19, 1813, Governor Snyder, of Penn- 
sylvania, vetoed twenty-five bank charters ; 
March 21, 1814, forty charters were passed 
over his veto. Banks multiplied on every 
hand, especially in the Middle States, where 
they speculated in government stocks. The 
system was generally to deposit stock notes 
for the capital, issue notes even beyond this. 
and loan them on accommodation paper. 
Bridge and other companies in this way got 
their capital from the public. 

The New Orleans banks suspended in 



1 Treasury Report, 1815, with review of the finances 
of the war. See also Treasury Report for 1827, and a 
letter of Gallatin in Niles's Register, February 21, 1846, 
on the finances of the second war. 

2 Crawford's Report, February 12, 1820. 



the government in Treasury notes worth 90. 
The government had to pay in New En- 
gland in specie all that it owed there, while 
it nowhere received a specie revenue. At 
the same time the Boston merchants found 
that the Baltimoreans had the advantage 
of them in trade, for while the Bostonians 
paid duties in Treasury notes at 90, the Bal- 
timoreans paid in their own bank-notes at 
80. So little was the "exchange" under- 
stood that the Secretary (Dallas) complain- 
ed because he got bids for the loan of March 
3, 1815, which "varied according to the ar- 
bitrary variations of what is called the dif- 
ference of exchange." The object of this 
loan was to fund Treasury notes. The Sec- 
retary fixed the price of his bonds at 95, ei- 
ther in Treasury notes or " cash," i. e., bills 
of suspended banks. The result was that 
the large subscriptions were made where the 
currency was most depreciated, and were 
made in " cash." Where the currency was 



1 Gouge's Journal of Banking, quoted in Macgrej 
or's Commercial Statistics, iii. 987. 



244 



MONETARY DEVELOPMENT. 



about at 95, the subscriptions were paid half 
in " cash," and half in notes. Where the cur- 
rency was worth more than 95, the subscrip- 
tions were all in Treasury notes. The Sec- 
retary's own table shows this at a glance. 1 

In the disorder of the currency, Eppes (on 
behalf of Jefferson ) proposed a government 
paper money fundable in stock, such as was 
issued in January, 1815, and never circu- 
lated. Dallas, the Secretary of the Treas- 
ury, October 17, 1814, proposed a national 
non-specie-paying bank. Calhoun proposed 
a bank on Treasury notes, but which should 
never suspend specie payments. Dallas's 
scheme passed the Senate, but was defeat- 
ed in the House by the double vote of the 
Speaker (Cheves). A plan for a bank to be 
prohibited from suspendiug passed, and was 
vetoed January 30, 1815. Dallas's paper 
scheme passed the Senate again, but was 
defeated in the House by one vote on Feb- 
ruary 17, the day the news arrived of the . 
Peace of Ghent. It was heard of no more. 

At the next session Calhoun re-introduced 
the bank, the charter being Dallas's work. 
It was passed April 10, 1816. The bank was 
to have $35,000,000 capital, $7,000,000 to be 
subscribed by government in five per cent, 
stock, $28,000,000 by the public, of which 
$7,000,000 was to be in specie and $21,000,000 
in six per cent. United States stocks. It 
was to pay a bonus of $1,500,000 in one, two, 
and three years. It was to issue no notes 
under $5, and was forbidden to suspend un- 
der twelve per cent, penalty. Votes were 
to be given at elections of bank officers by 
an intricate limitation, varying according 
to the number of shares held, and directors 
could serve only three years out of four. 

This bank was to correct the currency 
and to control the exchanges, which no bank 
can do or ought to do. It was to be the 
financial Providence of the country, bring 
exchange to par, and keep it there in an im- 
mense sparsely settled country with defect- 
ive means of communication. Its capital 
was far too large, and there was no reason 
for putting part of the capital in stocks. 
Finally, there was no reason why the gov- 
ernment should have shares in it. 

April 30 Congress voted that specie pay- 

1 This report (1815) was very correctly criticised by 
Mr. Nathan Appleton : On Currency and Banking (Bos- 
ton, 1S41), Appendix D. 



ments ought to be resumed February 20, 
1817, and that government ought to accept 
only specie or its equivalent in payment 
thereafter. The banks refused to resume 
before July, 1817. The stock of the Bank 
of the United States was taken in July in 
such a way that a Baltimore clique, taking 
advantage of the rule about voting, got 
votes enough to control the organization. 1 
By subscribing as attorneys they got 22,187 
votes out of 80,000, and they subscribed only 
$4,000,000 out of $28,000,000. In November 
the stock was at $42.50 for $30 paid. The 
organization took place October 28, fifteen 
directors being Democrats and ten Federal- 
ists. The directors allowed, December 18 
and 27, discount on the pledge of stocks, by 
which the specie payment in the second in- 
stallment (January 2) was evaded. Wild 
stock-jobbing now began, especially among 
those inside. After February 20 all stock 
was discounted at par (65 paid). " The dis- 
counts, the payment of the second install- 
ment, the payment of the price to the own- 
er, the transfer, and the pledge of the stock 
were, as it is termed, simultaneous acts." 
August 26, 1817, they voted to discount on 
the stock at 125. The third installment 
was partly paid in bank-notes because gov- 
ernment stock was at a premium in notes. 
August 28, 1818, the bank refused to re- 
ceive or pay its notes except at the offices 
specified on the note, and also refused to col- 
lect drafts, etc., except for exchange rates, 
thus abandoning the attempt to "equalize 
exchange." In April, 1819, it refused to 
transfer funds for the government except at 
exchange rates, thus disappointing another 
expectation in regard to it. 

The bank was going on just after the pre- 
vailing fashion. Instead of restraining, it 
joined the race. The Secretary in 1817 said 
that he had paid off all the United States 
stock in the capital of the bank, and he paid 
off $13,000,000, which seems, therefore, to be 
the amount paid in, instead of $21,000,000. 
The rest was bank-notes or stock notes. 
This redemption turned the whole capital 
into a shape demanding use, and led to a pro- 
digious expansion of credit. The State banks 
agreed to " resume" if the bank would extend 

1 The story is told here consecutively. The doings 
inside the bank were not made known until the inqui- 
ry in 1S19 and Cheves's report in 1822. 



LIQUIDATION UNDER DIFFICULTIES, 1819-1823. 



245 



its discounts at New York $2,000,000, Phil- 
adelphia, $2,000,000, Baltimore, $1,500,000, 
Virginia, $500,000. There never was any re- 
sumption in fact. 1 August 8, 1817, the pres- 
ident and cashier were authorized to dis- 
count $500,000, and subsequently to discount 
$2,000,000, between discount days, in their 
discretion. September 30 they were au- 
thorized to renew notes so discounted. The 
stock was then at its highest, 155-156!. 
From July, 1817, to December, 1818, the bank 
imported $7,300,000 in specie, at an expense 
of over $500,000. Congress appointed an in- 
vestigating committee, on the rumor that 
things were not all right, and because the 
bank had not helped the currency. They 
reported 2 January 16, 1819, exposing the 
facts here detailed. The president of the 
bank and the managers at Baltimore re- 
signed. March 6, 1819, Langdou Cheves be- 
came president. He fouud the bank bank- 
rupt, but already engaged in vigorous efforts 
to contract its obligations. These meas- 
ures were continued. The loss at Baltimore 
was $2,000,000, the whole loss $3,000,000. 
February 25 Congress refused to order a 
scire facias for the forfeiture of the charter. 

Maryland, Ohio, and Kentucky had at- 
tempted to tax the bank, but the tax was 
declared unconstitutional. 3 In Ohio a tax 
of $100,000 was collected by force September 
16, 1819, but ordered restored, after long liti- 
gation, in September, 1821.* 

Meanwhile the commerce, industry, and 
finance of the world had been finding their 
way back to the ordinary natural forms and 
channels of peace, and away from the un- 
natural developments of war. This did not 
take place without shocks and confusion 
throughout the commercial world. The 
United States had, for insufficient reason, 
plunged into the general melee, and the re- 
sult was that not only was their commerce 
first unnaturally distorted and then crush- 
ed, but also their home industry had sought 
unnatural developments, and their finances 
had been thrown into confusion. In 1816 
paper money yet prevailed in Europe, and 
was depreciated more than ours. The ex- 



1 Crawford's Report, February 12, 1820. 

2 See the report and documents in Niles's Register, 
vols. xv. and xvi., series 1. 

3 4 Wheaton, 316. 

4 Final action and history of the case, 9 Wheaton, T39. 



changes were favorable to the United States, 
and a golden opportunity was offered for re- 
sumption. In 1819 efforts were being made 
all over Europe to resume, and masses of 
metal were moving from country to coun- 
try. In the midst of this state of things 
came the real, though not publicly known, 
break-down of the bank. Its efforts to re- 
cover itself prostrated the whole industry 
of the country. Prices, which had risen fifty 
or one hundred per cent, since 1814, fell even 
below the former level, and a grand liquida- 
tion set in, which ran through some three or 
four years. 

In 1820 exchange on England rose to 105 
and 106, which carried off gold, the par of 
gold being 102.72, or, with expenses, 105. 
Par of silver was 106 (at 15! to 1), or, with 
expenses, 108. In fact, silver was then de- 
pressed to 16 for 1 by the demand for gold 
in England, and it took 110 to draw silver 
from bere. Exchange rose at a leap from 
106 to 110, and then to 112 — rates which the 
living generation could hardly remember. 
Every gold coin here was drawn away, for 
there was no such profit on any thing else 
exported. The re-adjustment was not com- 
plete before 1822 or 1823, and it was not 
brought about without great suffering. 1 

In 1823 land was worth forty or forty-five 
per cent, less than in 1806, and sixty or sev- 
enty per cent, less than in 1817 ; 2 thousands 
in actual suffering; families living on one 
dollar per week ; 3 women earning six and 
a quarter cents per day. The distress was 
all used as an argument for protection. 

The indiscriminate rage of men like Gouge 
and Niles against " banks" dates from this 
period. Niles again and again speaks of 
banks just as one would speak of gambling 
hells. There were three kinds of paper 
afloat in 1819 : first, notes of incorporated 
banks with more or less pretense to solv- 
ency; second, notes of banks which had no 
other reality than a counting-room, books, 
and a plate — their notes were circulated at 
a distance, and when they came home the 
bank ceased to be ; third, counterfeits in enor- 
mous quantities, though they differed from 
the second kind only in stealing a name 

1 Valuable reports on coinage, etc., by Lowndes, H. 
E., January 26, 1819, and J. Q. Adams, February 22, 1821. 

2 Mles's Register, August 23, 1823. 

3 Xiles's Register, May 17, 1823. 



246 



MONETAKY DEVELOPMENT. 



some oue else bad invented, instead of in- 
venting a new one. The amount afloat can 
not be guessed at. Niles 1 said tbe number 
of banks was put at 397 on unknown au- 
thority. Tbe bomilies about extravagance 
and protecting borne industry, and tbe praise 
of tbe old simple times, tben began. Tbese 
times bave never been since tbe earliest co- 
lonial days, when people were so poor that 
tbey could buy nothing. Since tben they 
bave bought all tbey could, and as tbey 
have been getting rich fast, they have al- 
ways had far more good thiugs at the end 
of any twenty years than at its beginning. 

In 1817 the sinking fund was raised to 
$10,000,000 per annum, and more, if possible, 
leaving $2,000,000 in the Treasury. In 1816, 
1817, 1818, and 1819 this sum was paid, and in 
some years much more ; but in 1820, the rev- 
enue having declined, $2,000,000 were bor- 
rowed from the sinking fund, with many 
apologies. In 1821 it was curtailed over 
$3,000,000, but without any apologies. It 
showed that the sinking fund is simply 
what can be saved and paid, nothing more 
or less. 

During the next decade the scene of in- 
terest is in the West. Kentucky, Tennes- 
see, Illinois, and Missouri tried stay laws, 
tender laws, property laws, and paper issues 
iu every form. Kentucky tried the experi- 
ment most thoroughly ; the others desisted 
sooner. A history of Tennessee banking 
was given by Judge White in a speech in 
the Senate March 24, 1838. s 

In the East things soon returned to order, 
and the next years were generally quiet 
financially. The agitations were in regard 
to protection. The revenue was good, the 
public debt was being paid, canals were be- 
ing built, and although there was, in regard 
to all these things, much which a conserva- 
tive economist would disapprove, yet there 
was perhaps nothing but what must be tol- 
erated in a new and poor country. It may 
suffice here to mention the following impor- 
tant incidents : In 1819 it was proposed to 
issue a government paper money. Secretary 
Crawford reported against it February 12, 
1820. In 1820 a loan of $3,000,000 was con- 

" August 29, 1818. 

5 A short history of banking in the separate States 
is given in a series of articles in the Bunkos' Magazine, 
vol. xi. 



tractetl, and in 1821 a loan of $5,000,000. 
July 2, 1821, a committee of stockholders of 
the bank reported its losses at $3,547,838 80. 
October 1, 1822, Mr. Cheves reported on the 
state of the bank when he took it, and his 
efforts to save it. The Suffolk bank sys- 
tem was organized in New England in 1824. 
The investments of foreign capital here, 
1823-1825, were estimated at from $30,000,000 
to $38,000,000.' The great crisis of 1825 in 
England did not have great effect here. In 
1826 there was a great collapse of unsound 
banking institutions in various parts of the 
country. Many such had been organized at 
New York, and in New Jersey opposite. Sev- 
eral of the projectors were condemned to the 
penitentiary. 

Andrew Jackson became President March 
4, 1829, and proceeded to reform the gov- 
ernment. In the summer of that year com- 
plaints were made by New Hampshire pol- 
iticians that the branch of the bank at 
Portsmouth was presided over by Mr. Jere- 
miah Mason, a friend of Mr. Webster. The 
administration sought to induce Mr. Biddle 
(president of the bank since January, 1823) 
to remove Mr. Mason. He refused, and this is 
the earliest germ we can find of a great war. 
Mr. Biddle was in the position of resisting 
an alliance of Bank and State. 2 The Mes- 
sage of 1829 astonished the nation by ques- 
tioning the constitutionality and advantage 
of the bank, whose charter would not ex- 
pire until March 3, 1836, and proposing a 
bank on the revenues and credit of the 
nation. The bank had lived down the odi- 
um of its early history. The Committee of 
Ways and Means reported April 13, 1830 (by 
McDuffie), in favor of rechartering the bank 
at the proper time. The Committee of Fi- 
nance of the Senate reported March 29, 1830, 
that the currency was good, and in a fair 
way to improve. " They deem it prudent 
to abstain from all legislation, to abide by 
the practical good which the country enjoys, 
and to put nothing to hazard by doubtful 
experiments." In November, 1830, Mr. Gal- 
latin published the article on the currency 
above referred to, in which he showed that 



i Niles, November 22, 1823; June 12,1824; January 
22, 1S25. 

3 J. Q. Adams's Report, 1S32. The history is given 
consecutively ; incidents which did not become public- 
ly known until later are put iu their proper place. 



THE BANK EECHARTERED. 



247 



the bauk had been very useful. These doc- 
uments no doubt represented the opinions 
of the educated and business classes at that 
time. 

The revolution of 1830 in France, political 
disturbances elsewhere on the Continent, 
and the disturbances which preceded the 
Eeform Bill in England were then causing 
much capital to be sent to this country. 
The new canals just opened, the railroads 
just beginning to be built (for horse-power), 
the application of anthracite coal to the 
arts, and numerous improvements in all 
branches of production afforded ample op- 
portunity of applying this capital here to 
advantage. The same improvements in En- 
gland tended to an unprecedented increase 
of capital, which sought investment here for 
the next eight or ten years. 

It was under these circumstances that 
the President set about an " experiment" 
with the currency. The Message of 1830 
repeated the opiuion of 1829 in regard to 
the bank ; that of 1831 was milder. Janu- 
ary 9, 1832, the petition for a recharter was 
presented. A special committee having 
been appointed in the House, a majority re- 
ported against the recharter ; McDuihe and 
Adams both made counter - reports. The 
charges against the bank were, first, that 
its assets consisted largely of accommoda- 
tion loans in the West, which were created 
by "race-horse" bills, and were worthless. 
(There was too much truth in this ; the 
branch drafts since 1827 had been mischiev- 
ous.) Second, extending favors to Con- 
gressmen. (This was admitted and defend- 
ed.) Third, using political influence. (It 
appeared rather that the administration had 
tried to use the bank politically.) The re- 
charter passed, but was vetoed July 10, 1832. 

In 1830 $3,000,000 of the $7,000,000 five 
per cent, stock of the United States which 
was in the capital of the bank was redeem- 
ed, and in 1831 the remaining $4,000,000. 

By treaty of July 4, 1831, France agreed 
to pay the United States 25,000,000 francs 
as indemnity for spoliations after 1806. The 
Secretary drew on the French Finance Min- 
ister for the first installment, due February 
2, 1833, and sold the bill to the bank. The 
French Chambers had made no appropria- 
tion to carry out the treaty, and the bill was 
protested, but taken up by Hottinguer for 



the bank. The bank claimed fifteen per 
cent, damages, and reserved the sum with 
interest ($170,041) from dividends due the 
government July 17, 1834. The government 
gained the suit to recover this in 1847. ' 

The government desiring to pay off the 
three per cents in 1832, the bank assumed 
and carried them a year longer. The Pres- 
ident expressed his fears that the public de- 
posits were unsafe in the bank, in his Mes- 
sage, 1832. The majority of the Committee 
of Ways aud Means found the deposits safe, 
but the minority made a strong attack on 
the bank on account of the Western loans. 
These were rapidly reduced. 

During the summer of 1833 overtures were 
made to the State banks to receive the pub- 
lic deposits. August 19, 1833, the govern- 
ment directors of the bank made a report 
showing large expenditures by the bank for 
printing and distributing documents during 
the campaign of 1832. These consisted of 
Gallatin's article, the minority reports of 
Adams and McDuffie, et al. 2 

Meanwhile the national debt was being 
rapidly paid, and a surplus was to be ex- 
pected after 1835. The opposition desired 
to divide the public lands, in order to cut 
off revenue, and to go into internal im- 
provements, in order to increase expendi- 
tures, but not to reduce the protective tar- 
iff. The tariff of July 14, 1832, was finally 
modified by the act of March 2, 1833, to re- 
duce duties until 1842. The pound ster- 
ling was rated at $4 80 for customs pur- 
poses, standard weights and measures were 
distributed, 3 and the credit on duties was 
shortened. 

September 18, 1833, the President read in 
his cabinet an argument against the bank, 
showing why the deposits ought to be re- 
moved. Duane, who had only been Secre- 
tary since May 29, refused to remove them. 
He was dismissed, and Taney appointed, 4 by 
whom they were transferred. The amount 

i 2 Howard, 711, and 5 Howard, 382. 

s Keport of directors on " A Paper read in the Cab- 
inet," December 3, 1833. (Nilcs's Register, December 
14, 1833.) 

3 The weights in use at the various custom-houses 
varied sixteen per cent. The proportion of the bushels 
in use was: Bath, 74; Portland, 76; Saco, 80; Boston, 
78 ; New York, 781 ; Philadelphia, 781 ; Baltimore, 771 ; 
Newbern, S7|; Charleston, 78 ; Savannah, 76. (Xilcs's 
Register, January 5, 1833.) 

* He was not confirmed. 



248 



MONETARY DEVELOPMENT. 



was $9,800,000. The Secretary of the Treas- 
ury is in an ambiguous position, being dis- 
missible as a cabinet officer, and yet charged 
with independent responsibility. The six- 
teenth section of the bank charter gave to 
him power to remove the deposits. This act 
caused great alarm, being apparently a bold 
and self-willed, but not intelligent, act. 
Credit was disturbed, and the winter passed 
iu commercial distress. In February, 1834, 
the President, in answer to a deputation 
from Philadelphia, 1 sketched his new pro- 
gramme. He would crush the bank, try the 
plan of using State banks as fiscal agents, 
introduce a metallic currency, and use spe- 
cie only for the government. The radical 
weakness of this plan was that he could in 
no way control the State banks, though they 
should do far worse things than the Bank 
of the United States had done. 

Bank of the Ignited States. 



ary 1. 



Loans 

Circulation 
Deposits.. . 
Coin 



44,000,000 
16,200,000 
17/209,000 
L0,800,000 



1832. 1833. 1834. 

4 « i| I 

66,200, 61,600,000 84,900,000 

21,300,000 1T,5oo,(l0i) 19,200,000 
22,700,000 20,300,000 10,800,000 

7,000,0()o| 8,900,000,10,000,0001 



Small banks now sprang up in great num- 
bers to claim the deposits, and they urged 
political reasons generally for being granted 
a share. 2 December 3, 1833, Taney gave the 
reasons for removing the deposits : First, the 
Exchange Committee of the Board of Direct- 
ors governed the bank. (This was a well- 
founded complaint. It was the arrange- 
ment which made the final catastrophe of 
the bank possible.) Second, the bank had 
meddled in politics. Third, selfishness in de- 
ferring the three per cents and demanding 
damages on the French draft. December 9, 
the government directors reported that they 
were excluded from knowledge of the affairs 
of the bank. March 28, 1834, the Senate re- 
solved that the President had " assumed 
upon himself authority and power not con- 
ferred by the Constitution and the laws." 
April 15, the President sent in a protest 
against this resolution, which the Senate re- 
fused to register (27 to 16). The resolution 
was " expunged" January 16, 1837. April 4, 
1834, the House resolved that the bank ought 
not to be rechartered nor the deposits re- 



» Niles, March 1,1834. 

2 See Xiles's lieyister, April 8, 1837. 



stored, and raised another committee. Of 
this the majority reported, May 22, that the 
bank had refused to submit to investiga- 
tion; the minority reported that the com- 
mittee had made unreasonable and improper 
demands. 

February 4, 1834, the Senate appointed a 
committee which reported, December 18, fa- 
vorably to the bank. The Message of 1834 
reviewed the controversy and renewed the 
old charges. 

June 28, 1834, the coinage was altered so 
that the silver dollar should weigh 412£ 
grains, 371.25 grains pure, and the gold dol- 
lar 25.8 grains, 23.2 grains pure, rating the 
metals as 15.99 to 1. The standard for silver 
was 0.900 fine ; for gold 0.89922. This ex- 
pelled silver, rating it as much too low as it 
had before been too high. Another mistake 
was made at the same time by rating foreign 
coins too high, so that they were a cheaper 
tender than American coin. This prevent- 
ed them from being sent to the mint. The 
act of January 18, 1837, brought both metals 
to the standard 0.900, and made the gold dol- 
lar 23.22 grains fine. From this time par 
of exchange with England was 109£, or 
£1=$4.8665. A gold eagle, coined before 
July 31, 1834, was worth $10,668 in eagles 
coined after that. 

The new banks opened a period of specu- 
lation in 1834, which went on through 1835, 
growing wilder and wilder, seizing on cot- 
ton lands and negroes, city lots, Western 
lands, and every form of stocks. 1 The ad- 
ministration, it is true, prevailed on the fol- 
lowing States 2 to forbid notes under $5 : 
Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, 
Tennessee, Louisiana, North Carolina, In- 
diana, Kentucky, Maine, New York, New 
Jersey, Alabama. Connecticut had forbid- 
den $l's and $2's; Mississippi and Illinois 
had no notes under $5 ; and Missouri had no 
bank of issue ; but the exchanges were kept 
favorable by exporting securities (import- 
ing capital), and the position was one of 
unstable equilibrium. The specie in the 
country was $64,000,000. The prevailing be- 
lief was that bank issues could be extended 
to any amount, if only there was one-third 
the amount in specie behind them. 



» Niles, May 9, 1835. 
a Treasury Report, 1S3B. 



THE FINANCIAL CRISIS IN 1836. 



249 



The directors of the bank 1 ordered the 
Exchange Committee, March 6, 1835, to loan 
the funds of the bank on stock as fast as it 
was called in, in order to facilitate the wind- 
ing up. The branches (of which there were 
twenty-five) were sold, and bonds taken pay- 
able in from one to five years. In the win- 
ter of 1835-36 it was suddenly proposed that 
Pennsylvania should grant a charter to the 
bank, and a bill was passed February 13, 
1836, doing so, but joining the charter with 
internal improvement schemes and a repeal 
of some taxes. The conditions were very 
onerous. Thus instead of winding up March 
3, 1836, the bank went on as the United 
States Bank of Pennsylvania. Under the 
resolution of March 6, 1835, $20,000,000 of its 
capital had been loaned on stocks, and it 
had its bonus to the State to pay, the shares 
of the government to pay back, and the cir- 
culation of the old bank to redeem. The 
Exchange Committee had complete control 
of the bank. 2 

In the winter of 1835-36 the rates for capi- 
tal advanced under great fluctuations, such 
as always occur on a bank-note currency 
with an inadequate coin basis. The great 
fire of December, 1835, at New York led some 
to propose a bank of $5,000,000 for the suf- 
ferers. Niles said, " To make a bank is the 
grand panacea for every ill that can befall 
the people of the United States, and yet it 
adds not one cent to the capital of the com- 
munity." 3 

During 1836 speculation went on, although 
rates for loans were twelve to twenty per 
cent, per month throughout much of the 
year. Prices were so high that wheat came 
here from Europe. It was said that the 
canals, etc., had drawn laborers away from 
agriculture. In the fall the Bank of En- 
gland refused to discount for bankers 
who were granting American credits, and 
those houses reduced their acceptances from 
£20,000,000 to £12,000,000 during the win- 
ter,* producing still greater distress here, 
both directly and indirectly, by the fall in 
cotton. 

The public debt was all paid January 1, 
1835, and a surplus of over $40,000,000 accu- 
mulated during 1836. The administration 

1 Report of 1841. a Ibid. 

3 Register, January 2, 1836. 

4 Morning Chronicle, in Niles's Register, April 29, 1S37. 



having done all the harm it could by scat- 
tering this over the Union in forty banks, 
the opposition now undertook to withdraw 
it from the banks and distribute it to the 
States in the ratio of Congressional repre- 
sentation. The bill passed June 23, 1836. 
It ordered the surplus over $5,000,000 Jan- 
uary 1, 1837, to be deposited with the States. 
The Message of 1836 contained a criti- 
cism of this proceeding which was unan- 
swerable, although the three great men, 
Clay, Calhoun, and Webster, all favored the 
scheme. 

July 11, 1836, the Secretary of the Treas- 
ury issued a circular forbidding the receipt 
of any thing but specie for public lands. 
Congress passed a resolution jiractically re- 
scinding this. It was sent to the President 
March 2, and he sent it to the State De- 
partment to be filed at 11.45 p.m., March 3, 
1837. 

February 25, 1837, the United States Bank 
offered to pay oft" the public shares at $115 58 
per share, in four installments, September, 
1837, 1838, 1839, and 1840. March 3 Con- 
gress ordered this offer accepted, and it was 
fulfilled. 

Early in March Herman Briggs and Co., 
of New Orleans, failed, on account of the 
decline in cotton. J. L. and S. Joseph and 
Co., of New York, failed as soon as the news 
reached New York. This was the begin- 
ning. The whole Southwest was pros- 
trated. At New York one failure followed 
another among those who held Southern 
funds. Mr. Biddle had before acted as 
financial Jupiter, and to him prayers were 
now addressed. He came, March 28, and 
sold post-notes for mercantile paper at 112, 
which notes brought in cash 95. They were 
payable in Europe, and were remitted to 
settle, instead of shipping specie. In April 
news came that three great houses granting 
American credits, Wilson, Wildes, and Wig- 
gins, had become dependent on the Bank of 
England, and were being carried on a guar- 
antee from the City. The panic now re- 
commenced, and ran on increasing until 
May. May 8 a run on the Dry Dock Bank 
caused its suspension. The other banks 
were forced to suspend on the 9th and 10th. 
The Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other 
banks followed as the news spread. Each 
city professed that it could have held out, 



250 



MONETARY DEVELOPMENT. 



but was forced to yield in the general in- 
terest. 

In May news reached England of events 
here in March, and post-notes instead of 
money. The great question was: Can the 
Americans pay ? The amount of American 
debts falling due June 1 was, to the tbree 
W.'s, £3,800,000; to other English houses, 
£5,000,000; to France, £1,500,000. Total, 
£10,300,000. The American houses were 
allowed to fall June 1. They failed for 
£2,000,000; £1,300,000 was covered by the 
guarantees, and £700,000 fell on the bank. 1 
An arrival of $100,000 in specie sufficed, how- 
ever, to restore American credit and to turn 
the tide. Extensions were granted, securi- 
ties were negotiated, and in general long- 
credits secured. 

On the suspension gold went to 107, all 
specie disappeared, and the country was 
flooded with shin-plasters. The premium 
on gold was greater in the South and West, 
being 120-125 in the Southwest. There 
were said to be $80,000,000 in specie in the 
country, which Benton said would be its 
" bulwark" against financial disaster. Thus, 
between those who misused paper and those 
who held the superstition of gold, the advo- 
cates of sound doctrine were either wanting 
or their voices were drowned. 

May 3 a committee of New York mer- 
chants went to Washington to ask the re- 
call of the specie circular, delay in collect- 
ing duty bonds, and the calling of an extra 
session of Congress. The first the President 
(Van Buren) would not do, the second he 
could not do, and the third he thought use- 
less ; but the necessities of the government 
forced the last. Congress met September 4, 
and passed bills to collect the deposits of 
the suspended banks, to delay the collection 
of duty bonds, and to issue Treasury notes. 
Three installments of the deposit had been 
paid. The fourth ($9,000,000) was yet in 
the banks. As to calling back any of the 
$28,000,000 which had been " deposited," no 
one proposed it. It was with great difficul- 
ty that the payment of the fourth install- 
ment was deferred until January 1, 1839. 
It was not paid at all. The Treasury Re- 
port of 1838 showed $2,400,000 still due from 
suspended banks. 

1 London Times, in Giles's Register, July 22, 1S37. 



The bank had really had very little 
grounds for the position it had assumed as 
public benefactor. It was itself a borrow- 
er. A ring of officers and their friends were 
using the funds of the bank, putting securi- 
ties in the cashier's drawer, and taking out 
cash. These transactions passed examina- 
tion day as "bills receivable." In July, 
1837, the bank began to speculate in cotton, 
of course through outside firms, but, as Mr. 
Biddle said in his letters to Clayton, 1841, it 
was to meet the post-notes of the bank. 
He also thought that he could carry cotton 
to get a price. Mr. Jaudon was sent to Lon- 
don as agent for the bank September 22, 
1837. He executed some sensational trans- 
actions, the consequence of which was that 
he was regarded as a reckless and danger- 
ous man. 

The New York banks tried all winter to 
get a general agreement to resume, but with- 
out success. The New York law allowed the 
suspension for one year. May 10, 1838, the 
New York and New England banks resumed. 
The New York banks had pursued a policy 
of contraction on all their liabilities which 
at the time was regarded with great disfa- 
vor, and was unfavorably compared with 
Mr. Biddle's policy of "repose" under the 
suspension. It produced health, however, 
and brought New York out of the troubles 
of the times at least three years before Phil- 
adelphia issued from them, and with far less 
suffering on the whole. The Philadelphia 
banks delayed until the Governor forced 
them to resume, August 13, 1838. Mean- 
time Mr. Biddle was writing plausible let- 
ters to Mr. J. Q. Adams to manufacture pub- 
lic opinion. Perhaps his head was turned 
by the position of financial Providence to 
the country. It would not be strange. In 
the summer of 1838 he enjoyed his high- 
est prestige. Mr. James G. King induced 
the Bank of England to send £1,000,000 
in specie here, and some of it was sent, 
which w r ent into the United States Bank, 
and was thought a great victory for Mr. 
Biddle. He was said to have carried the 
merchants of Philadelphia, the great corpo- 
rations of the country, and the public im- 
provements of Pennsylvania through the 
crisis. 1 The great bank was, however, an 

1 New York Express, in Xiles's Register, May 12, 183S. 



SUSPENSION OF BANKS IN 1839. 



251 



unwieldy hulk, which was already strauded, 
and Mr. Biddle's bravado was only prepar- 
ing a more humiliating downfall. He had 
become president of the bank at the age of 
thirty-seven, succeeding Mr. Cheves, who 
was considered too conservative. He had 
been urged on to bold methods of banking, 
flattered as to his success, and encouraged 
to assume unbusiness-like duties and re- 
sponsibilities. 1 December 10, 1838, he wrote 
his last letter to Mr. Adams, in which he 
finally abdicated for the bank the position 
of financial Providence. March 29, 1839, he 
resigned the presidency of the bank, leav- 
ing it, as he said, prosperous. During 1838 
its stock had reached 123. When he resign- 
ed it was 111-113. July G, 1838, an act was 
passed by Congress to prevent the bank from 
re-issuing the notes of the old bank. 

The notion of controlling the cotton mar- 
ket, which has been mentioned, was embod- 
ied in a circular of June 6, 1839, proposing 
a grand national combination to " bull" cot- 
ton. It was issued by Mr. Wilder, who de- 
nied that the bank was in the plot, but it 
appeared in 1841 that this was a prevarica- 
tion. The Manchester Guardian* spoke of 
it as " the most rash and insane speculation 
of modern times." The mills closed up, the 
price fell, and the speculators were ruined. 
$1,400,000 had been gained previously by 
the clique, of which $800,000 had been di- 
vided. The residue and $900,000 more were 
now lost. 3 In August Mr. Jaudon was in 
great straits for money, and was calling on 
Biddle and Humphreys, of Liverpool, to get 
money at any sacrifice of cotton. The bank 
here was selling post-notes in New York, 
Boston, and even smaller cities. In August 
it drew all the bills it could sell on Hottin- 
guer, and shipped the proceeds in specie to 
meet the bills. The object was to force the 
New York banks to suspend.* The drawee 
had given warning that he would not hon- 
or any bill unless he was covered. Septem- 
ber 18, 1839, bills for 2,000,000 francs were 
presented, for which the specie had not ar- 
rived. They were refused, but the Eoths- 

1 Contemporary criticism was all colored by party 
feeling. The most just and intelligent criticism, com- 
bined with sound financial doctrine, is in Mr. N. Ap- 
pleton's pamphlet On Currency and Banking, 1841. 

2 Quoted in Niles's Register, July 27, 1839. 

3 Biddle's first letter to Clayton, 1841. 

* Biddle's second letter to Clayton, 1841. 



childs took them up, 1 and also some 8,000,000 
francs more which were out, Mr. Jaudon 
finding security. 

The fact of the protest was known in 
New York, October 10, 1839, but the Phila- 
delphia banks had suspended the day be- 
fore. They were followed by all the banks 
South and West, and by those of Rhode Isl- 
and. The New York and other New En- 
gland banks did not suspend. This was 
the real break-down of credit. There was 
no recovery from this, except through a 
liquidation, which went on during 1840. 
The Pennsylvania Legislature set January 
15, 1841, as the day beyond which the pen- 
alties of suspension should be enforced. 
January 1, 1841, the bank published a list 
of its assets, from which it appeared that its 
capital was locked up in a lot of the most 
doubtful securities on the market. A run 
on the banks began as soon as they opened, 
January 15. In twenty days the United 
States Bank paid out $6,000,000, and the 
other banks $5,100,000. February 4 they all 
suspended again. The United States Bank 
had just loaned the State $800,000, and it held 
over $2,000,000 of Michigan bonds which it 
had not paid for. It had paid or loaned to 
Pennsylvania $12,000,000 since the charter 
was granted. 2 Suits were now brought 
against the bank in such number that all 
hope of recovery was destroyed. Three 
trusts were established to wind it up. A 
committee of stockholders reported April 
3, 1841, and gave a history of the bank for 
six years, for, as they said, " The origin of 
the course of policy which has conducted to 
the present situation of the affairs of the 
institution dates beyond the period of the 
recharter by the State." Mr. Jaudon bor- 
rowed $23,000,000 in Europe between No- 
vember, 1837, and July, 1840. After that 
he borrowed $12,200,000 at an expense of 
$1,100,000 for discounts, etc., and the ex- 
penses of his office were $335,937. The for- 
eign debt of the bank was $15,000,000. One 
firm had had over $4,000,000 of cash from the 
drawer between August, 1835, and Novem- 
ber, 1837. Jaudon, Andrews (first cashier), 
and Cowperthwaite (second cashier) had 
owed the bank $300,000 or $400,000 each, and 

1 The Messager in Niles's Register, November 2, 1839. 

2 Memorial to Pennsylvania Legislature (Xiles's Reg- 
ister, February 2T, 1841). 



252 



MONETAEY DEVELOPMENT. 



settled by handing over stocks, etc. The 
losses on cotton had been repaid to the 
bank by the clique in doubtful securities. 
The stock in April, 1843, was quoted at ll. 1 
January 1, 1846, the notes still outstanding 
■were $3,400,000. Every one seems to have 
dropped the bank suddenly in disgust, and 
it is even more difficult to get information 
about its obsequies than about its earlier 
proceedings. 

In a Treasury Report of January 8, 1840, 
it was stated that there were 850 banks and 
109 branches, of which, in 1839, 343 suspend- 
ed entirely, and 62 partially, 56 had failed 
entirely, and 48 had resumed. The Phila- 
delphia banks resumed March 18 or 19, 1842. 



a precedent was fortunately avoided. The 
States and Territories without debt were 
New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, 
Vermont, New Jersey, Delaware, North Car- 
olina, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Those which 
at any time failed to pay interest were Penn- 
sylvania, Maryland, Louisiana, Indiana, Illi- 
nois, and Arkansas. Those which repudiated 
part of their debt were Mississippi, Michi- 
gan, and Florida. Pennsylvania suspend- 
ed in 1842. l Her debt, January, 1843, was 
$37,900,000. She resumed in February, 1845. 
Mississippi plumply repudiated $5,000,000. 
Louisiana repudiated $20,000,000, but the 
banks finally assumed or provided for it. 
Michigan settled up by disposing of her 

Comparative Bank Statements. 



I No. 



1820., 
1830.. 
1834. , 
1835.. 
1836. , 
1837. . 
1838.. 
1839.. 
1840. . 
1841.. 
1844.. 
1845. . 
1848* . 



308 
330 
506 
704 
713 
788 
829 
840 
901 



697 3 
791 



Capital. 



137,100,000 
145,100,000 
200,000,000 
231,200,000 
251,800,000 
290,700,000 
317,600,000 
327,100,000 
358,400,000 



197,000,000 
200,800,000 



44,800,000 

61,300,000 

94,800,000 

103,600,000 

140,300,000 

149,100,000 

116,100,000 

135,100,000 

106,900,000 

74,300,000 

44,800,000 

97,000,000 

125,200,000 



Deposits. 



75,600,000 
83,000,000 
115,100,000 
127,300,000 
84,600,000 
90,200,000 
75,600,000 
57,000,000 
88,300,000 
87,300,000 



19,800,000 
22,100,000 



43,900,000 
40,000,000 
37,900,000 
35,100,000 
45,100,000 
33,100,000 
25,800,000 
46,900,000 
43,200,000 
49,200,000 



American credit held good abroad until 
1839. Loans were negotiated during 1838 
with as much success as ever. The " depos- 
its," however, had seduced the States into 
great expenditures for improvements, and 
into debts. The debts of the States were 
about $200,000,000 in 1840. The amount of 
American securities held in England was 
over £20,000,000 sterling in 1837. 5 In 1839 
the credits given in 1837 were not all met, 
and some States defaulted. Doubts of the 
credit of the States arose. Mr. Webster was 
in England, and gave the Barings an assur- 
ance of the constitutionality of the debts. 6 
An effort was made in 1840 to have Congress 
assume the State debts, but so mischievous 



1 Table from Bicknell's Reporter in Niles's Register, 
September 30, 1843. Twenty-three stocks are given. 
A share of each would have cost, in 1836, $2839 62 ; in 
April, 1842, $708. 

s Branches included. In 1840 one hundred and one 
banks and branches are estimated. The statistics have 
value only as general indications. 

3 Twelve more, with capital $7,300,000, not reported. 
Niles, February 7, 1846. 

* Bankers' Magazine, in Niles, February 26, 1848. 

5 London Bankers' Circular in Xile.s's Register, March 

25. 1837. Garland's estimate, $110,000,000. Niles, July 

21. 1838. « Niles, December 28, 1839. 



public works. Maryland suspended in 1842, 
but resumed in 1848. The delinquencies of 
interest in 1844 were over $7,000,000. 2 Some 
on the other side sneered at republicanism 
and Yankees on account of these defaults. 3 
Some here cared little for the losses of for- 
eigners. They gravely mistook the value 
to a young new country of its credit, its pow- 
er to borrow capital of old countries. 

The debt began to grow again as soon as 
it was extinguished, and the accounts show 
indebtedness every year after 1835 (when 
some $30,000 of old claims were outstand- 
ing). After 1837 the Treasury notes, which 
were authorized from year to year, raised 
the debt to $32,700,000, January 1, 1843. 
After that it was reduced to $15,500,000, 
January 1, 1846. The Mexican war carried 
it up to $63,000,000, January 1, 1849. The 
Texan indemnity of $5,000,000 was passed 
September 9, 1850 ; $15,000,000 were paid to 
Mexico in five installments, and $3,250,000 



1 See Sydney Smith's letter to Congress in M'Cul- 
loch's Dictionary of Commerce, article " Funds." 

2 Niles, October 12, 1844. 

3 Webster's letter to Biddle. Niles, September 12, 
1840. 



DISCOVERY OF GOLD IN CALIFORNIA. 



253 



of her debts to American citizens, assumed 
under the treaty of February, 1848 ; $7,000,000 
were paid for the Gadsden purchase of De- 
cember, 1853. The debt reached $68,300,000 
January 1, 1851,but was reduced to $28,600,000 
January 1, 1857. 

The Sub-Treasury, after having been ve- 
hemently discussed thoughout Van Buren's 
administration, was established July 4, 1840. 
At the special session which assembled May 
31, 1841, the Sub-Treasury was abolished, 
two national bank bills were passed and ve- 
toed, a bankruptcy act, a revenue act rais- 
ing duties to twenty per cent, throughout, 
and a land distribution act, with proviso 
that it should not be executed at any time 
when duties were over twenty per cent., 
were passed. The bankruptcy act was sign- 
ed August 19, 1841, and repealed February 
25, 1843. At the same special session the 
Secretary reported that $2,620,500 had been 
lost within twelve years by the defalcations 
of public officers. At the regular session, 
1841-42, a temporary and a permanent tar- 
iff were both vetoed because they provided 
for violating the proviso in the land dis- 
tribution bill. A third tariff of high pro- 
tective duties passed, and laud distribution 
was cut off. The duties were to be collect- 
ed on the " home valuation," and no credit 
was to be given. In 1842 the pound sterling 
was rated at $4 84 for customs purposes. 
August 6, 1846, the independent Treasury 
was re-established, and the operations of 
the government were prescribed to be car- 
ried on with specie. The result proved the 
system wise and sound. The government 
had nothing to do with banking, and very 
little to do with the money market. 

The paper money disease broke out next 
in Ohio, Iudiana, and Illinois. The Fort 
Wayne Times 1 gives a description of the 
currency of Indiana in 1843, which is in- 
structive as to some doctrines of " redemp- 
tion." State bank paper was the stand- 
ard. " Scrip" was issued for the domestic 
debt of the State, and was receivable for 
State dues. " Bank scrip" was a State issue 
to the bank to reimburse it for payments to 
canal contractors. " White Dog" was a 
State issue to pay for canal repairs, and was 
receivable for certain lands at its face and 

1 Giles's Register, September 30, 1843. 



interest. " Blue Dog" was a State issue for 
canal extension, receivable for canal lands 
and canal tolls. " Blue Pup" was a shin- 
plaster currency issued by canal contract- 
ors, and redeemable in " Blue Dog." Quota- 
tions (State Bank being standard) : scrip, 
85-90 ; bank scrip, 85 ; White Dog, 80-90 ; 
Blue Dog, 40; Blue Pup— I 1 In 1845 the 
quotations of Illinois currency were, State 
Bank, 42-45 discount ; Bank of Illinois, 50- 
55 discount ; Cook County orders, 18-20 dis- 
count ; canal indebtedness, 60-75 discount ; 
railroad scrip, 60-75 discount; Bank of 
Michigan, 85 discount ; Michigan or Indiana 
State scrip, 10-15 discount. 2 

In the summer of 1845 the business sta- 
tus was said to be : stocks neglected, much 
building going on for the "new communi- 
ties" which were coming across the water, 
money abundant, exchange at par. 3 In 
1846 and 1847 the potato famine in Ireland 
sent us thousands of emigrants, and in 1848 
the revolutions on the Continent sent thou- 
sands more. The potato famine also gave 
us a market for grain, and saved us from a 
share in the financial troubles of 1847. Tho 
repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and our own 
more liberal tariff of that year, gave wider 
scope to industry. Railroads were extended 
already, both here and in Europe, far enough 
to affect production and exchange. The tel- 
egraph was just coming into general use. 
Ocean steam navigation was rapidly extend- 
ing. Upon this set of circumstances came 
the discovery of gold in California in 1847. 
At once a great emigration thither of ad- 
venturous men began, and also a great spec- 
ulation in exports thither. The gold diggers 
found that they ran into hardship, danger, 
and toil to pursue an industry which was pre- 
carious at best, and that the same amount 
of sacrifice would have gained more com- 
forts at the East. Their industry nourished 
the gambling spirit, and their gains changed 
hands first over the gaming table. 

The traders were little better off after a 
few years. The market was alternately 
glutted and empty, and the gains of one 
period were swallowed up in the losses of 

1 The Ohio nomenclature was wider still. "Yellow 
Dog," " Red Cat," " Smooth Monkey," " Blue Pup," and 
" Sick Indian" (Niles'a Register, June 28, 1845). More 
particular descriptions are wanting. 

a Niles, June 28, 1S45. 3 Niles, June 14, 1845. 



254 



MONETAEY DEVELOPMENT. 



another. It was the great industrial world 
which gained by this new supply of the me- 
dium of exchange, which came just when it 
was needed to sustain the new development 
of industry and commerce. The first ex- 
change of the metal was for food and man- 
ufactured articles. It presented a new and 
sharp demand for agricultural and manu- 
factured products. New fields were opened, 
new factories built, not here only, but in 
all the commercial countries. The new and 
enlarged industries brought richer returns 
than before both of wages and profits, not 
on account of the money, but on account of 
the whole industrial expansion which the 
new supply of money facilitated, and the 
possibilities of which already lay in the im- 
provements mentioned. The returns in all 
these industries being large, the demand 
for luxuries was extended, and the importa- 
tions of wines, cigars, silks, etc., rapidly in- 
creased. The accumulation of capital was 
also rapid, and credit institutions which 
sought to facilitate its transfer sprang up 
in all civilized countries. They never have 
been able, under such circumstances, to re- 
frain from credit creations in addition to 
the capital which passes their hands, and 
they did not refrain in this case. In the 
United States all the old tendency to over- 
issues, heightened, as it unquestionably was, 
by the usury law, and also the general use 
of accommodation paper, were at hand to 
assist such a movement. 1 

After two or three years of low discount 
rate and cheap food, there followed in 1853 
rumors of war and a bad crop in England. 
This caused high prices for wheat here and 
a renewed speculation in Western lands and 
railroads, which issued in 1854 in a formal 
crisis and panic in Wall Street. Some Cal- 
ifornia traders also found their affairs at a 
crisis, but generally the mercantile commu- 
nity held firm. The indebtedness for for- 
eign importations was large, and the invest- 
ments of foreign capital here were rapidly 
increasing. The Secretary of the Treasury 
estimated them at $200,000,000. 



1 As an example of the comprehensive and philo- 
sophical study of commercial crises, from which alone 
any correct knowledge of them can be derived, men- 
tion should be made of Max Wirth's Geschichte der 
Handetekrise.n (Frankfort, 1874), from which some sug- 
gestions are here adopted. 



During 1856 the discount rate of the Bank 
of England was high, the harvest being 
poor and the importation of wheat great. 
In the spring of 1857 it was feared that the 
harvest here would not be good, but during 
the summer it turned out so well that the 
fear was lest it might not bring a price. 
Suddenly, on the 24th of August, the failure 
of the Ohio Life and Trust Company, of Cin- 
cinnati, an old and highly esteemed institu- 
tion, with liabilities for $7,000,000, was an- 
nounced. It had loaned its means to new 
railroads, and then borrowed more to lend. 
This incident passed, however, without caus- 
ing general alarm. The banks knew best 
what it meant. They reduced their loans 
in New York city from $120,000,000, August 
22, to $67,000,000, October 17. This produced 
a crisis. The whole fabric had been built 
up on bank credits, and it was ruined when 
they were withdrawn ; but the banks fear- 
ed for themselves, so it was said that the 
panic broke out in the bank parlors. On 
the 12th and 13th of September the Phila- 
delphia banks and others of the South and 
West (except of New Orleans) suspended. 
Mercantile failures now commenced, and fol- 
lowed day by day, the panic increasing, as 
money Avas locked up by any one who could 
get and keep it. The run on the New York 
city banks for note redemption began on 
the 9th. On the 13th an agreement was 
made to open a run on them for deposits in 
order to force them to suspend. Eighteen 
succumbed on that day, and thirty-two more 
the next day. One did not suspend. The 
New England banks followed immediately. 
The Constitution of New York forbade the 
Legislature passing any law to allow a bank 
suspension, but the judges of the Supreme 
Court agreed to grant no injunction against 
a bank unless there should appear to be 
fraud. The Northern and Eastern banks re- 
sumed in December. The Pennsylvania Leg- 
islature authorized suspension until May. 
Of nine banks at New Orleans only four sus- 
pended for a few days. 

This crisis was short, sharp, and severe. 
It never touched the productive powers of 
the country. It is the only one in our his- 
tory on a currency approximately of specie 
value. The recovery was rapid, and the 
reaction healthful. The losses were very 
great, but it was only a bad stumble in a 



THE SITUATION IN 18G1. 



255 



career of great prosperity, and it simply- 
taught sobriety and care. The number of 
bankruptcies in the Uuited States and Can- 
ada was 5123 ; liabilities, $299,800,000 ; 3839 
bankrupts, with $197,000,000 liabilities, were 
expected to pay forty cents on the dollar ; 
435 resumed, and paid in full $77,100,000 ; 
$143,700,000 were a total loss. Fourteen rail- 
roads 1 suspended payment on $189,800,000. 
Cotton manufacturers suffered severely by 
the fall of cotton (sixteen cents to eight 
and a half cents) and by the depreciation 
of stock. The American securities held in 
Europe at this time amounted to $400,000,000. 

The tariff had been lowered by act of 
March 3, 1857, and the revenue suffered, of 
course, from the financial crisis. Indian 
wars had also increased the expenditures. 
Treasury notes were issued by act of De- 
cember 23, 1857 ; loans were authorized 
Juno 14, 1858, and June 22, 1860. The debt 
January 1, 1861, was $90,500,000. There 
were on the same date 1605 banks, with 
$429,600,000 capital, $207,200,000 deposits, 
$91,300,000 gold, $202,000,000 circulation, and 
$696,700,000 loans. 

The election of Mr. Lincoln was followed 
by movements toward secession and politic- 
al alarms. There ensued limitation of busi- 
ness, contraction of credit, reduction of en- 
terprise, and some hoarding of gold. Prices 
were reduced, the foreign exchanges fell, 
gold began to be imported. During the 
winter the Southern States seceded, and 
the political excitement increased. South- 
ern collections became difficult, and then 
ceased. The failures during the year 1861 
were 5935, for $178,600,000. 

The Morrill tariff had passed the House 
May 10, 1860. Protection had been adopted 
in the Chicago platform. After the depart- 
ure of the Southern Senators the tariff pass- 
ed the Senate, and was approved March 2, 
1861. It was soon buried deep under the 
financial legislation of the war. 

Part of the loan of June 22, 1860, had been 
offered in October, 1860, but some of the sub- 
scribers withdrew after the election. De- 



1 Wirth treats his readers to an account of the pur- 
chase of the Wisconsin government for $872,000 by 
the La Crosse and Milwaukee Railroad (p. 341), and he 
translates a number of confessions of American ras- 
cality from the newspapers of the post-panic period, 
when extravagances in that direction were in order. 



cember 17, 1860, $10,000,000 Treasury notes 
were authorized : $5,000,000 brought 88 ; in 
January $5,000,000 more brought 89 and 90. 
February 8, 1861, a loan of $25,000,000 was 
authorized ; on March 2, another loan of 
$10,000,000 was voted, or Treasury notes to 
the amount of this and all unissued loans : 
$35,300,000 were issued. In March Secreta- 
ry Chase refused bids under 94. In May 
$5,000,000 Treasury notes were sold under 
onerous conditions, and May 25 the banks 
took $6,400,000 in bonds at 85 to 93, and 
$2,200,000 Treasury notes at par. July 4 
Congress met in extra session. On the 17th 
they voted to issue $50,000,000 non-interest- 
beariug demand notes, receivable for all 
dues; also 7.30 notes; also a loan at six 
per cent, to fund the same ; and August 5, 
another loan. The Secretary proposed a di- 
rect tax of $30,000,000. Congress voted and 
apportioned $20,000,000, of which $8,000,000 
fell on the seceded States. August 5 the 
tariff was extended. After Bull Run the six 
per cent, stocks were at 88£. August 19 the 
banks agreed to take $50,000,000 Treasury 
notes under conditions unfavorable to the 
government, and two months later to take 
$50,000,000 more. In November they took 
six per cent, bonds at 89, under still harder 
conditions. 

The morale of the nation was now high. 
The war feeling was strong, and the enthu- 
siasm had only settled down into determi- 
nation. The Secretary of the Treasury 
reported an enormous deficit, and did not 
propose any way to deal with it. He look- 
ed wistfully toward paper issues, but re- 
jected that plan. He proposed a national 
bank system, but such a moment did not 
seem propitious for reconstructing the bank- 
ing system of the country. A run on the 
banks and an export of specie began in De- 
cember. On the 30th all the banks sus- 
pended. Specie was at one or two per cent, 
premium. 

December 24, 1861, duties on tea, coffee, 
and sugar were raised. February 12, 1862, 
$10,000,000 demand notes were issued, like 
those of July 17, 1861. February 25, 1862, 
$500,000,000 of 5-20 bonds were authorized. 
The same act established a sinking fund of 
one per cent, on the debt, and provided foi 
the issue of $150,000,000 of non-interest-bear- 
ing notes (" greenbacks"), legal tender, con- 



256 



MONETARY DEVELOPMENT. 



vertible into six per cent, bonds. This was 
the Legal Tender Act. It was passed as a 
temporary war measure, under the stress of 
necessity. There was necessity for money, 
a necessity which had been neglected three 
months too long, but there was no necessi- 
ty for a legal tender law. It was another 
illustration of Daniel Webster's saying, 
when a paper bank was proposed in 1815, 
"A strong impression that something must 
be done is the origin of many bad meas- 
ures." The old demand notes were to be 
withdrawn. As they were received for 
duties, they bore the same piemium as 
gold. The Secretary was also authorized 
to receive deposits at five per cent, to the 
amount of $25,000,000, raised March 17, 1862, 
to $50,000,000, July 11, 1862, to $100,000,000, 
and June 30, 1864, to $150,000,000, and six 
per cent, interest allowed. July 11, 1862, 
$150,000,000 more legal tenders were voted, 
and the provision of the act of February 25 
for funding them in six per cent, bonds was 
omitted. Those of February 25 were to be 
recalled. The first issue of legal tenders 
was in April, 1862. As they were issued, 
gold rose and all specie disappeared. An 
effect was produced at first just like that 
noticed above as following the opening of 
the California mines, but the paper did not 
distribute itself over the world. It threw 
American prices out of relation to those of 
the rest of the world ; that is to say, it dis- 
turbed all the relations of value and ex- 
change, both internally and externally. 
July 1, 1862 (just a year too late), an act 
was passed laying internal taxes. This 
was extended by acts of March 3, 1863, June 
30, 1864, March 3, 1865. The last provided 
for a commission to investigate the subject 
of internal revenue. 

March 17, 1862, an act was passed author- 
izing the purchase of coin, which was nec- 
essary until the " old demand notes" were 
all paid in. The act of March 1, 1862, au- 
thorized certificates of indebtedness. July 
14, 1862, duties were raised " temporarily." 

The act of July 17, 1862, provided for an 
issue of stamps to be used as " change," but 
they were inconvenient, and the act of 
March 3, 1863, provided for $50,000,000 of 
fractional notes. 

February 25, 1863, the National Bank Act 
was passed, authorizing $300,000,000 of bank 



capital, to be distributed, half of it by 
banking capital, and half of it by popula- 
tion. An act approved July 12, 1870, added 
$54,000,000, and provided for withdrawing 
and redistributing an excess above the quo- 
ta held in New York and the East. This 
last was found impracticable. The act of 
January 14, 1875, removes all restriction on 
the amount of capital. The $54,000,000 
were never taken up by those who had not 
their " quota," but are now in a fail* way to 
be taken up by those who before had an ex- 
cess. Banking capital does not go by heads 
nor by square miles. 

October 5, 1865, there were sixty-six na- 
tional banks in operation. The system rap- 
idly absorbed nearly all the banks. The law 
required that country banks should hold fif- 
teen per cent, of their circulation and depos- 
its in greenbacks, and that the banks in the 
large redemption cities should hold twenty- 
five per cent. The banks were afterward 
allowed to count their reserves with their 
redemption agents as part of this reserve 
up to three-fifths of the required amount. 
The act of June 20, 1874, did away with this 
reserve, as far as circulation is concerned, 
and substituted a five per cent, reserve to 
be kept at Washington, where the redemp- 
tion takes place. 

The Comptroller of the Currency report- 
ed, December, 1874, that 2200 banks had 
been organized, 35 had failed, 137 wound 
up, 2028 remained. December 31, 1874, 
there were 2027 banks in operation ; cap- 
ital, $495,800,000 ; loans, $955,800,000 ; bonds 
to secure circulation, $412,900,000 ; specie, 
$22,400,000 ; United States Treasury certif- 
icates of deposit, $133,500,000; legal tend- 
ers, $82,700,000 ; five per cent, redemption 
fund, $16,900.000 ; circulation, $332,000,000 ; 
deposits, $682,800,000. 

In his report for 1862, the Secretary sus- 
tained his legal tender paper money by all 
the old paper money fallacies. He set his 
face against the " gold speculators." March 
3, 1863, a tax of one-half per cent, was laid 
on time sales of gold, and six per cent, per 
annum also for the time the contract had to 
run. June 20, 1864, gold trading was for- 
bidden. Gold rose from 199 on the 21st to 
230 on the 23d, and fell to 207 again. The 
act was repealed July 2. Nevertheless Mr. 
Stevens introduced a bill, December 6, 1864, 



CONGRESSIONAL RESTRICTIONS ON THE CURRENCY. 



25: 



declaring gold and paper equal, and laying 
a fine equal to the amount of the proposed 
transaction, and imposing six months' im- 
prisonment ou any one who should contract 
to sell notes for gold. This was tabled, but, 
January 5, 1865, he tried to introduce the 
bill again. The opposition was so great 
that he withdrew it. It was not because 
he did not know of the English acts of 1811 
and 1812, and the fame of Mr. Vansittart. 
He did know of them. He specified those 
acts as laudable precedents, and wanted to 
imitate them, and he called Mr. Vansittart 
" the great financier." 

Gold reached its highest point, 285, in 
July, 1864. Sales of American government 
stocks in Germany began in the summer of 
1864. Loans were being contracted contin- 
ually which it is not thought necessary to 
enumerate here. They were being " float- 
ed" by the redundant paper in the hands of 
the people. The debt, June 1, 1866, was 
$2,800,000,000. The greenbacks out were 
$402,100,000. The national bank notes were 
$280,000,000. The fractional currency was 
$27,300,000. In May, 1865, gold fell to 140. 

The act of June 30, 1864, limited the 
amount of greenbacks to $400,000,000, and 
such part of $50,000,000 more as might be 
needed to redeem temporary loans. A gen- 
eral resolution in favor of contraction and 
resumption passed December 18, 1865, by 144 
to 6 ; but a measure allowing the Secretary 
to withdraw $10,000,000 in six months, and 
thereafter $4,000,000 per month, was lost, 
and only passed, on reconsideration, by 83 to 
52, April 14, 1866. This stiff and arbitrary 
measure had no principle of sound finance 
in it except that it went in the right direc- 
tion. If the Secretary had been allowed a 
tithe of the immense discretion allowed in 
creating debt and issues two years before, 
he could have withdrawn $200,000,000 in 
two years without annoyance, for at that 
time every one expected it, and there was 
no credit structure yet built on the inflated 
paper. The crisis in England in the spring 
of 1866, and the war on the Continent in the 
summer of that year, caused some stringency 
here, and set the gold premium in activity. 
In February, 1868, McCulloch's contraction 
was suspended by order of Congress. He 
had reduced the greenbacks to $356,000,000, 
at which point they stood until October, 
*17 



1872, when Mr. Boutwell, who affirmed that 
the $44,000,000 so withdrawn were under 
his control, issued $5,000,000 of them to cor- 
rect a stringency in Wall Street. It took 
him all winter to get them back. The sum 
remained $356,000,000 until the crisis of 1873, 
when it was raised to $382,000,000. The act 
of January 14, 1875, set that sum as the limit, 
allowed national banks to be formed to any 
extent, and to issue notes for ninety per 
cent, of the bonds deposited, and greenbacks 
to the amount of eighty per cent, on the 
additional notes issued are to be withdrawn 
until greenbacks are reduced to $300,000,000. 

March 2, 1867, for the third time in our his- 
tory, a general bankruptcy law was passed. 

March 3, 1865, the tariff was raised to com- 
pensate for internal taxes. July 13, 1866, in- 
ternal taxes were re-arranged and somewhat 
reduced. This is the act under which Hon. 
D. A. Wells became special commissioner. 
The office expired by limitation June 30, 
1870. Internal taxes were reduced by the 
acts of March 2, 1867, which exempted in- 
comes under $1000 ; February 3, 1868, which 
repealed the tax on cotton ; July 20, 1868, 
which reduced and re-adjusted the taxes; 
and by the act of July 14, 1870, which was 
a grand reduction. The income tax expired 
by limitation in 1871. The act of July 14, 
1870, also reduced duties somewhat (pig- 
iron $9 to $7 per ton). Up to this time the 
protective system had been steadily extend- 
ed by acts which have been left out of the 
present review as belonging more to com- 
merce than finance. The duty on tea and 
coffee was repealed in 1872, and a ten per 
cent, reduction over a number of important 
articles was made. In the session of 1874-75 
two acts were passed increasing and extend- 
ing duties. The result is that the balance 
which should exist between internal and 
customs duties in a sound system of taxa- 
tion has been more and more destroyed, 
that the customs duties have been placed 
too high and on too many articles to be 
productive of revenue, and that there is no 
system or principle in the present taxes at 
all. They weigh very heavily on the peo- 
ple without furnishing adequate revenue 
to the government. 

The act of March 3, 1865, provided for fund- 
ing Treasury notes in 5-20's. This went 
on through 1865, 1867, and 1868. Hence 



258 



MONETARY DEVELOPMENT. 



the 5-20's of those years. The act of July 
14, 1870, provided for issuing $200,000,000 in 
bonds at five per cent., $300,000,000 in bonds 
at four and a half per cent., and $1,000,000,000 
in bonds at four per cent., in order by ex- 
changes to reduce the interest paid. This 
is now being partly carried out through 
the "Syndicate." March 30, 1867, $7,000,000 
were paid for Alaska, and July 8, 1870, four 
per cent, certificates for $678,000 were is- 
sued to pay Massachusetts her old claims 
against the United States from the war 
of 1812. The principal of the debt Jan- 
uary 30, 1875, was $2,242,301,082 43, besides 
$64,623,512 issued to railroads. 

By the act of March 3, 1863, the Supreme 
Court was to have ten members, and a new 
judge was appointed. The act of July 23, 
1866, provided that no new appointments 
should be made until the number of judges 
was reduced to seven. By the act of April 
10, 1869, to take effect the first Monday in 
December, the court was to consist of eight 
judges and a chief justice. The case of 
Hepburn v. Griswold, 1 involving the con- 
stitutionality of the Legal Tender Act as to 
contracts made before its passage, was de- 
cided in conference November 27, 1869, by 
the Chief Justice and seven associates. One 
of these, Judge Grier, resigned February 1, 
1870, and the decision against the constitu- 
tionality of the act as applied to the con- 
tracts mentioned was announced February 
7. Judge Strong was appointed February 
18, 1870, and Judge Bradley March 21, 1870. 
The re-argument of Knox v. Lee, involving 
the decision just mentioned, took place in 
December, 1870. 2 Judge Miller read the de- 
cision of the majority affirming the constitu- 
tionality of the law, Chase, Nelson, Clifford, 
and Field dissenting. 3 

In September, 1869, a corner in gold was 
made which belongs to the financial history 
of the country, for it was the legitimate 
fruit of the existing financial system. It 
issued in a panic September 23 (" Black Fri- 
day"), when the Secretary of the Treasury 
intervened by a sale of gold to put a stop 
to the proceedings of a clique of character- 
less speculators. A panic in stocks follow- 
ed, and a number of important failures. 

1 8 Wall., 626. 

2 12 Wall., 457. 

3 See 12 Wall., 528, note. 



The coinage law of February 21, 1853, 
fixed the weight of silver coins for frac- 
tional parts of a dollar at 384 grains to the 
dollar, 0.900 fine ; legal tender for five dollars. 
It also put a seigniorage of one-half of one 
per cent, on gold coined. The effect was to 
send gold to England or France, where there 
was no seigniorage and lower mint charges. 1 
The act of February 12, 1873, reconstructs the 
coinage and mint laws entirely. The only 
silver dollar is the trade dollar of 420 grains 
standard, not meant to circulate here, but in 
the East. It is worth one dollar when sil- 
ver is at $1.14285 per ounce standard, which 
is just about the present price. The frac- 
tional coins were made to weigh 385.8 grains 
to the nominal dollar, so that two halves 
should just equal a five-franc piece. These 
coins are issued at $1.24414 per standard 
ounce, or 803f ounces for $1000, and are le- 
gal tender for five dollars. The gold dollar 
is yet the dollar of 1837, 23.22 grains fine, 
25.8 grains standard. 

The act of 1873 made the charge for coin- 
ing gold one- fifth of one per cent., but the 
second section of the act of January 14, 1875, 
repealed this, and left coinage of gold en- 
tirely free. The law of March 3, 1873, fixes 
the pound sterling for customs purposes at 
$4.8665, and prescribes that exchange be 
quoted $4 86, $4 87, etc. 

The stringency which had occurred in 
the fall of 1871 and 1872 was significant of 
the approaching absorption by expanding 
credit of the legally limited amount of pa- 
per currency. In the summer of 1873 the 
Granger agitation at the West frightened 
investors from railroad bonds, and crippled 
the enterprises which depended on the con- 
tinuance of these investments for funds. 
The rebuilding of Chicago and Boston had 
also caused a great absorption of circula- 
ting capital. September 8 the New York 
Warehouse and Security Company failed, 
followed by one or two firms involved in 
railroad construction. Confidence in per- 
sons known to be burdened in this way was 
impaired, and a run on them for deposits 
began. September 18 Jay Cooke and Co. 
succumbed to this demand, and a panic fol- 
lowed. The country depositors began to 

1 The best criticism on this is in Ernest Seyd's Sug- 
gestions in Reference to the Metallic Currency of the 
United States. London, 1871. 



THE OUTLOOK. 



259 



run on their banks, though without pan- 
ic. The country banks called for their bal- 
ances, and the city banks called their funds 
in from the brokers. On the 20th the Un- 
ion Trust Company suspended, followed by 
two or three other banks and trust compa- 
nies. The panic on the Exchange was so 
great that the Exchange was closed, and 
remained closed for ten days. The Gold 
Exchange closed on Monday the 22d, gold 
at 112. On the 20th the Associated Banks 
formed an alliance by which seven per cent, 
certificates were issued for seventy-five per 
cent, of the value of securities deposited 
by any bank, which certificates were good 
for Clearing-house balances ; $22,000,000 of 
them were issued before the tide turned. 
The President and Secretary were in New 
York on the 21st, but refused to draw on 
the $44,000,000. The Secretary ordered 
bonds to be bought as a measure of relief, 
and $12,000,000 were bought. This deple- 
ted the cash on hand, and before January 1 
he was obliged to issue over $26,000,000 of 
the $44,000,000 for current expenses. This 
carried the greenbacks up to $382,000,000. 
The suspension of paper payments by the 
banks lasted until November 22. Mean- 
while the crisis was affecting industry in 
all forms. It produced a general doubt of 
the status and of the future. Hours of la- 
bor and wages were reduced and workmen 
discharged. The lack of reviving courage 
and enterprise has been very marked, and 



is due to nothing else than the general 
feeling that there can be no permanent 
cure until the financial problem is solved. 
The failures in 1873 were 5183, liabilities, 
$228,100,000 ; those in 1874, 5830, liabilities, 
$155,200,000. The act of January 14, 1875, 
specified January 1, 1879, as the day for re- 
suming specie payments. 

The people of a new country are not like- 
ly to be very careful financiers. They have 
no traditions to carry down the warning of 
the past. They are not trained to look 
back or to look forward. They do not look 
back, because the great achievements of yes- 
terday only provoke a smile to-day. They 
do not look forward, because they trust 
their power to deal with whatever may 
come. We must not expect what is incon- 
sistent with the conditions. If we look to 
the past, there has been great progress. The 
theories on which the colonists based their 
paper " banks" obtain attention from no so- 
ber men to-day. The banks, whatever their 
faults, are not like those of 1816, nor yet 
like those of 1836. On the other hand, we 
are still struggling with the problems of 
currency and taxation and debt. A stu- 
dent of our past history can hardly expect 
that these will be solved by a heroic effort, 
but by a long and painful growth up to the 
conviction that financial make-shifts do not- 
pay, and that the first condition of dealing 
successfully with difficulty is to get free 
exercise of the national productive powers. 



IX. 



THE EXPERIMENT OF THE UNION, WITH ITS PREPARATIONS. 



THERE are some states and forms of 
government which have heen slowly 
building. themselves up for ages, while oth- 
ers are the artificial results of political the- 
ory. Tha first find support in historical 
causes and in past political habits. Hav- 
ing grown with a people, and being expres- 
sions of their national life, they are in little 
danger of overthrow from within, and pre- 
sent so great a resistance to aggression from 
without that nothing but a very superior 
force can destroy them. The states which 
are constructed on theory or after an ap- 
proved model, without being rooted in old 
habits, are much less sure of continuance. 
If enacted constitutions do not meet the 
wants of the nation, they have little self- 
preserving power, they awaken no enthu- 
siasm, they point back to no history on 
which a people's pride loves to dwell. Es- 
pecially is the life-power of institutional 
nations great. Those ancient institutions 
which are connected with the habits and 
affections of a people, and those local ones 
which carry the spirit of self-government 
into the smallest territorial divisions, and 
which are at the opposite pole from central- 
ization — these possess a tenacity of life to 
which no constitutions founded on the 
rights of man and on the almost mechanical 
working of functions of government can 
possibly attain. If in the course of time it 
should be found necessary to make changes 
in the form of government, such institution- 
al nations can make them without changing 
their political habits. The state puts on 
another dress, and seems to have passed 
through a revolution, but the revolution is 
confined to form ; the essential spirit of the 
polity remains as before. 

Yet even a nation wonted to self-govern- 
ment and to political reflection can not hope 
to escape changes of a different kind from 
those that generally give birth to revolu- 
tions in free communities. The changes to 
which we refer do not proceed from political 
causes in the first instance, although such 
causes may help tbem in their growth ; but 



they are to be ascribed to moral and social 
changes affecting large masses in the socie- 
ty. They resemble, on the great scale, those 
silent alterations in individual character 
when a man finds his old ways of thinking 
not so satisfactory to himself as they once 
were, or when he acquires the means of 
pleasure or of show of which in his youth 
he was destitute, or when he forms rela- 
tions and enters into intimacies with men 
of a class or of habits to which he was a 
stranger before. By-and-by he finds his old 
principles giving way ; he was not aware 
of the direction in which he was drifting 
until, perhaps, the work on his character or 
his faith is nearly done. In the same way 
the influences of changes in the relations 
of property when there is immense capital 
in the hands of a few by the side of a great 
proletarian class, or of a transition from sim- 
plicity of life and habits to showiness and 
expensiveness, or of changes of religious 
faith and moral principles undermined by 
social or philosophical causes, and giving 
way to skepticism or profligacy on the part 
of many — these influences may go on with- 
out being noticed or feared for a long time 
but are really more to be dreaded than po- 
litical revolutions. Changes from causes 
like these are hard to be estimated, not only 
because they are slow and silent, but also 
because the people themselves are the sub- 
ject of the change, and the new generations 
have no exact standard within their reach 
by which they can compare the present with 
the past. Their effects, again, on political 
institutions as well as on social life can not be 
prevented. You might as well try to keep 
a stream from running downward as to pre- 
vent these consequences altogether. Take 
an example : the feudal system could keep 
its sway over a nation as long as the feudal 
lords held all the land, and there was no, or 
next to no, personal property ; but as soon 
as the towns became great centres of manu- 
facturing and commerce, as soon as large 
merchants could lend money to kings and 
so turn the fortuue of war against the no- 



HISTORIC CAUSES OF POLITICAL GROWTH. 



261 



bles, so soon a new estate was in its germ, 
which, in the nature of the case, would de- 
mand a place in the political system, and 
could not long he kept out. Such an in- 
stance is a plain one, because the external 
side of life is visible to all, and is easily 
measured by the historian. But what shall 
we say of a general loss of religious faith in 
a nation, of the decay of simplicity, of integ- 
rity in public and private affairs, of honor, 
of respect for the institutions or habits of 
forefathers? Shall we not say that these 
changes in a people's moral principles must 
have an effect upon their capacity to endure 
political restraints, to bear political free- 
dom, to deal soberly with obstacles in the 
way of prosperity, to respect the relations 
of private life, to be orderly and contented 
amidst the inequalities of fortune? 

In forecasting the dangers to which na- 
tional union or liberty is exposed, in esti- 
mating the probabilities for the future of 
good or evil growing out of causes already 
active or now beginuing to act, in endeav- 
oring to form a judgment on the continuity 
of political habits, in discussing the ques- 
tion whether a community has a self-re- 
forming power when evil is already admit- 
ted into its system — we must look at moral 
and historical influences both. These may 
be coeval and concurrent at their origin, 
while afterward a new set of causes may 
come in and act either together or on oppo- 
site sides. If they are found in decided 
conflict — the historical, for instance, being 
conservative, and those of a moral nature 
destructive — the tendency will be toward 
national weakness and decay, unless there 
is life enough left to reform the body-poli- 
tic. Or they may come iuto existence at 
different epochs; and in general it is true 
that new moral influences, themselves the 
results, in part, of changes in society, ap- 
pear after states are fully organized, and 
amidst great public as well as private pros- 
perity. 

Bearing these remarks in mind, let us look 
at the development of our institutions from 
the time of the first English colonies on- 
ward. For one of the most hopeful things 
to be said of these United States is that we 
are what we are not chiefly by any forecast 
of our own, still less by any intention to 
form a great English-speaking nation on 



this side of the water, but because histor- 
ical causes which could not be foreseen 
shaped and moulded us into a tolerably 
homogeneous and compact people. This is 
the only nation of civilized men of which it 
can be said that we passed through all the 
stages of our life, from birth onward, through 
revolution to self-government and political 
greatness, in a natural progress, so that what 
some call historical accidents stand out, in 
our case most especially, to a man who sees 
a God in the world, as His guidance and 
purpose to make something good out of us: 
which purpose we can thwart, but one is 
filled with hope by believing that it is real. 

Among the advantages which the English 
colonies had at their commencement deserve 
to he mentioned the nationality of the first 
colonists, the time at which they emigrated, 
and their general character. 

We are not disposed, on the score of race, 
to claim a superiority for the Anglo-Saxons 
over the inhabitants of other parts of Eu- 
rope ; nor can we believe that if there had 
been no Norman conquest, no check on the 
kings by the nobles, no parliaments, no op- 
position to papal interference by statutes of 
prcemunire and against provisors, no Prot- 
estant Reformation, the English race would 
have of course developed itself by its inher- 
ent energies into something great and good. 
It was, in fact, owing to national decline that 
William of Normandy succeeded in his con- 
quest of Saxon England. But we rejoice 
that the first colonies were composed chief- 
ly of Englishmen, because they brought with 
them the habits and traditions of a land 

"Where freedom broadens slowly down 
From precedent to precedent." 

It was not in England, as on the Continent, 
that the towns needed to conspire with the 
kings against an oppressive nobility, or that 
the nobility gained privileges exclusively for 
their own order, leaving the others to take 
care of themselves, but the Magua Charta 
and all the securities of freedom that fol- 
lowed it were for the benefit of all. Then; 
the Parliament at an early day separated 
into two Houses, and by its power of grant- 
ing or withholding taxes, which was derived 
from feudalism, came to have a material part 
in making the laws. It was there that the 
town privileges and habits of local self-gov- 



262 



THE EXPERIMENT OF THE UNION, WITH ITS PREPARATIONS. 



ernment maintained themselves with more 
permanence than on the Continent. There 
arose a numerous yeomanry, holders of small 
portions of land in their own rights — a class 
which since the emigrations has almost dis- 
appeared in the old country. There, too, 
the freemen were called to act on juries, 
and felt that they were part of the power 
of the country. Thus the colonists brought 
with them habits of self-government and the 
spirit of free Englishmen, which were not 
likely to fade out of their characters in the 
new wilderness life where they were forced, 
in great measure, to model their own insti- 
tutions. 

The time of the emigrations was the best 
possible for the formation of new self-gov- 
erning communities. If they had begun in 
the century before the Reformation, when 
the civil wars of England had destroyed a 
large part of the upper classes and barba- 
rized the people, the star of empire setting 
its way westward would have shed a baleful 
light. Little intelligence, no learning, small 
acquaintance with the arts, no religious 
thoughtfulness, and an ill-defined feeling 
of political rights would have presided over 
the birth of the new settlements. If they 
had begun in the middle of the eighteenth 
century, when England had fallen to its 
lowest degree of moral and religious degen- 
eracy, and when the old yeomanry were be- 
ginning to disappear, these States would 
have been founded by a less hardy class, 
with purposes in changing their homes that 
were less noble, and with less of the vigor- 
ous manhood required in the conquest of 
nature. It is a remark of the political 
economists that the best prospects for suc- 
cessful colonization belong to an age anteri- 
or to division of labor on a great scale. Men 
whose lives are spent in one process of man- 
ufacture are not well fitted for all the vari- 
ous employments of a settlement in the wil- 
derness, where every one must know a little 
of the numerous arts of life, or succumb in 
the conflict with unsubdued nature. The 
time which determined the character of the 
American colonies was prior to the great 
modern triumphs of mechanical invention. 

We have also great reason to be thankful 
for the average character of the early colo- 
nists. M. Guizot, in speaking of the English 
and French revolutions, contrasts them in 



this respect : that the English occurred in a 
religious age among a religious people, while 
the French broke out in an age when the 
human mind doubted, or denied with ex- 
treme boldness, every thing that had been 
settled before. The first colonies belonged 
to that religious age, and though it would 
not be true to say that religious liberty was 
the only motive of even the Puritan colo- 
nists, yet it was a very strong motive, and 
it furnished the best conditions for the rise 
of a God-feariug and liberty-loving nation. 
For they who planted first of all the church, 
and the school by its side, who within a few 
years founded a college, as a pattern for all 
that should afterward arise, might indeed 
be narrow in some of their views and prac- 
tices, but they were the best possible pio- 
neers of a coming host of freemen. So, also, 
the Quaker settlements were dictated by 
the desire to enjoy their religion in peace, 
away from the oppressive laws of England 
and of its colonies ; their leaders were 
among the best men of the mother country. 
The Catholics of Maryland founded their 
colony for the sake of religious freedom. 
The Dutch of New Netherlands did not, in- 
deed, emigrate for this purpose ; but they 
belonged to a noble race, in whose memories 
the times of William the Silent were still 
fresh, and their settlements at the end of 
his son Maurice's life were favored by the 
more liberal of the two political parties. 
The more southern colonies did not, it is 
true, have motives in their emigrations 
much beyond the ordinary ones that lead 
people away from their homes. Some, more- 
over, who joined them at an early time add- 
ed any thing but character and strength; 
yet the chivalrous spirit and the attach- 
ment to English institutions which animated 
the best of the settlers in that quarter were 
to become valuable elements in the forma- 
tion of the national character. 

Besides the classes of colonists just men- 
tioned, two others deserve to be spoken of, 
although, on account of their small num- 
ber and the later date of their emigration, 
they contributed comparatively little to the 
qualities which mark the American people. 
One of these were the Huguenots, who came 
in the greatest numbers soon after the revo- 
cation of the Edict of Nantes, and who, mak- 
ing small settlements in New York, Massa- 



FORTUNATE CONDITIONS. 



263 



chusetts, Virginia, and South Carolina, have 
given to the country a numher of honorable 
and important families. Larger and more 
compact settlements were made by the 
Scotch -Irish Presbyterians of Ulster in 
New Hampshire, Western Pennsylvania, and 
North Carolina — a class of inhabitants of 
whom their descendants have a right to be 
proud. 

Another most fortunate circumstance in 
the early history of the country was the 
substantial equality of the early settlers. 
They nearly all belonged to that industrious 
middle class which is the strength of a na- 
tion. A few servants came with the more 
opulent of the colonists, and a few younger 
branches or near connections of noble fam- 
ilies established themselves both in the 
Northern and the Southern settlements, but 
not enough to have any sensible influence 
either on the spirit or the destinies of the 
land. It was fixed well-nigh a century be- 
fore the Eevolution that if such an event 
should happen, and the colonies become 
self-governing, there could be no strife of 
orders to add complexity to the struggle 
with the mother country. 

Still, again, it deserves notice that the 
slowness with which population and wealth 
increased during a century and a half con- 
tributed to the steadiness, the simplicity of 
manners, and sobriety of judgment of the 
people. The colonies went into the war of 
independence with a population of less than 
three millions. There were no towns con- 
taining twenty -five thousand inhabitants 
at the peace in 1783. There were no cen- 
tres of business in the last century such as 
now exist. Merchants in some of the small- 
er villages of the Eastern States imported 
their goods directly from England ; as, in- 
deed, it was the custom in parts of the 
South for the planters of a district to re- 
ceive their annual supplies from the old 
countries and send back their tobacco and 
other commodities in the same vessel. In 
regard to social distinctions it may be said 
that they were more marked than now. Cer- 
tain families here and there had a pre-emi- 
nence conceded to them, which rather grew 
out of old ancestral respectability than out 
of wealth, which was acknowledged willing- 
ly and accepted without pride. In a few 
large places a style prevailed which wanted 



the show and expense of our times, but ap- 
proached nearer to the style of true gentle- 
manly living. This was a tradition from 
the usages of the upper middle class in En- 
gland, which was as natural, as much ex- 
pected from persons of a certain standing, 
as plain living was from the mass of the 
people. In those families, however, who 
set the mode, thrift, domestic economy, a 
training of the daughters for housekeeping, 
are believed to have prevailed which are now 
passing away. As there was slow growth, 
with no perceptible change, steady habits 
grew up in political as well as in social life. 
Take the colony of Connecticut for an ex- 
ample. Three Wyllyses of the same family 
were Secretaries of State in succession all 
the time from 1712 to 1810, and the middle 
one of the three for sixty-one years. One 
member of what is now called the House of 
Representatives was elected by his town to 
seventy-two Legislatures in succession, that 
is — since there were two annual elections 
— through a period of thirty-six years. It 
was comparatively rare for a minister to 
leave his parish until death called him 
away. Capital accumulated so slowly, and 
families were in general so large, that strict 
economy, the parent of many civic virtues, 
was almost a necessity. Men were free, and 
felt themselves to be equal, but marks of 
respect were voluntarily rendered to per- 
sons in public stations. When on Sunday 
the service was over, the minister and his 
family went out of church first, the congre- 
gation all rising, and in some places bow- 
ing until they had passed through the 
aisle. The display in dress was very small, 
but if the thick brocades which are now 
shown here and there as having belonged 
to a grandmother or a great - grandmother 
afford a criterion for judgment, materials 
were chosen which would last almost a life- 
time, while the ordinary household garb 
was very simple. If habits such as partic- 
ulars like these show to have existed did 
indeed prevail, they mark a character con- 
tented with the present, averse to innova- 
tion, neither anxious nor speculative — the 
best possible character for hardening and 
toughening a people in preparation for fu- 
ture struggles. And here, again, our good 
fortune in having had no aristocratic class 
in the proper sense of the term may be re- 



264 



THE EXPERIMENT OF THE UNION, WITH ITS PREPARATIONS. 



ferred to as another cause of simplicity of 
manners. For if there had been but a mod- 
erate number of noble families with large 
incomes and domains distributed through 
the colonies, their mode of living and dress- 
ing would have been the ideal, and would 
have made many dissatisfied with their mod- 
erate means. It might have been as it has 
since been in the new settlements of some 
of the Western States, where a very small 
percentage — say, five or eight per cent. — 
of slaves was diffused through the dis- 
trict. This small ratio was enough to 
bring white labor into disrepute. So, in 
the case supposed, a sprinkling of persons 
belonging to a noble class might have been 
enough to affect injuriously those solid 
and homely virtues which are the strength 
of a country. 

And here we are reminded of the one bit- 
ter drug poured into our cup — the institu- 
tion of slavery and the importation of blacks 
from Africa. The bringing over of indent- 
ured apprentices, of convict laborers, and 
of " redemptioners" was a small evil, for in 
fifty years they were lost in the population. 
But when, in 1620, a Dutch vessel brought 
twenty negroes for sale into James River, a 
new element of race and population was in- 
troduced, which has had, and may yet have, 
a vast and disastrous influence on our his- 
tory. This is not the place to pursue this 
gloomy subject to a great length. We sim- 
ply remark that the separation in interests 
and traits of character between the North- 
ern and Southern States was intensified by 
slavery far beyond the bounds of a healthy 
difference ; that the uniformity of interests 
produced by it in States where it existed 
gave them the power of combination, made 
them the political masters of the country, 
and opened the way for burning jealousies ; 
that the wearing out of the soil by the ag- 
riculture of slavery demanded new lands for 
its spread; that it tended to degrade the 
lower class of whites where it was predom- 
inant ; and that it was destined to come in- 
evitably into conflict with ideas of personal 
rights and with those religious feelings 
which demanded security for the sacred- 
ness of family ties in the negro race as well 
as for their mental and moral elevation. 
The conflict came, and was indeed awful. 
Had there been less blindness and more 



trust in the final triumph of justice, it 
would have been earlier and less severe. 

But that which more than all things 
else determined the future of this country 
was the number of colonies, together with 
their general similarity and their important 
differences. If there could have been one 
vast colony, under one government, extend- 
ing along the whole line of coast from the 
French possessions to the Spanish settle- 
ments in Florida, it might have been strong 
and prosperous possibly, but the present 
United States would not have grown up on 
such a foundation. There was a necessity 
of just such a series of colonies as were act- 
ually planted, all animated by a common 
English feeling, and speaking the common 
English tongue, yet settled for different rea- 
sons, and, in a course of many years of self- 
government, developed into different enti- 
ties, as well as having distinctive character- 
istics. The Northern and Southern groups 
of these colonies, alike among themselves, 
yet differing each from the other in their cli- 
mates, industries, institutions, and religious 
peculiarities, might have formed the nucleus 
of two nations if English feeling, influences 
from the mother country, trade, and many 
common interests had not brought them to- 
gether more than the causes of an opposite 
nature tended to keep tbem apart. The 
colonies lying between these extremes had 
no common likeness; indeed, before the ces- 
sion of New Netherlands to the. English they 
had no common bond of union, and after- 
ward, although best situated for purposes 
of commerce, were more fitted for some time 
to follow than to lead. We will make the 
supposition that wheu the Southern colonies 
admitted slavery, New England had thought 
it a sin and a shame ; even such an opinion 
could easily have prevented the two ex- 
tremes from meeting. As it was, slavery ex- 
isted every where, and not being regarded 
as a wrong or an evil until the Quakers be- 
gan to teach a higher morality, no such cause 
of separation existed. We will make anoth- 
er supposition, that the colony of New Neth- 
erlands, lying like a wedge on the coast, 
with the best sea-port within its borders, 
settled originally by colonists not under- 
standing the English tongue and not edu- 
cated under English political institutions, 
could have retained its nationality until no 



COLONIAL PREPARATION FOR THE UNION. 



263 



power could have conquered it. In this case 
a most serious problem would have offered 
itself in the course of time — either the East- 
ern and Southern English colonies would 
have pursued their destinies apart, or, if they 
could have acted in conjunction with the 
Dutch colony, difficulties from language and 
institutions might have prevented a perfect 
union. Thus we see that the colonies were 
pointed toward confederation by their his- 
tory, and "were almost prevented from es- 
tablishing any other kind of government 
throughout the course of centuries. One 
cluster of confederates, or more than one, 
seems to have been the only possible polit- 
ical alternative if they were ever to sepa- 
rate from the mother country. Two or more 
clusters, so far as we can interpret the prob- 
abilities of things, would have been most 
disastrous, as containing the seeds of strife, 
and sowing them for all the future. 

Another point connected with our colo- 
nial history deserves notice. We were not 
only prepared by the circumstances of our 
history for a confederation or union of 
States, but were educated for it by our re- 
lations to the mother country. The colo- 
nies all had law-making assemblies formed 
somewhat after the pattern of the Houses 
of Parliament, and the larger part of them 
chief executive officers holding their places, 
without any popular election, by appoint- 
ment of the king. At first, indeed, several 
colonies chose their own chief magistrates, 
but on various pretenses they were divested 
of this power, until at last two of the colo- 
nies subsisted under what was called a pro- 
prietary government, and two of the smaller 
alone retained their original free choice of 
all public officers. The royal Governors cer- 
tainly did not tend to establish friendly re- 
lations between the crown and its American 
subjects : witness the strifes between these 
magistrates aud the Legislatures in Massa- 
chusetts and Virginia. The proprietary gov- 
ernment in Pennsylvania was perhaps less 
acceptable, as placing it in the hands of a 
private man by hereditary right to fill a 
kind of secondary throne, with the power 
of vetoing the acts of the Legislature. The 
two chartered colonies of Connecticut and 
Rhode Island certainly had no occasion to 
find fault with their independence ; but 
they were brought up by their very privi- 



leges to be on their guard against any inva- 
sion of them, and could see little use in their 
distant connection with the crown. 

The exigencies of self-defense often call- 
ed for common counsels on the part of neigh- 
boring colonies, so that the minds of the 
people were accustomed to congresses gath- 
ered for objects in which all shared alike. 
The great contest between England and 
France for supremacy in North America ex- 
cited the' liveliest interest through the col- 
onies ; they looked on the French not only 
with the eyes of Englishmen as hereditary 
foes, but as allies also of the red men, and as 
willing to incite them to any treacherous 
act against the frontier English settlements. 
The prelude to the seven years' war was 
marked by the uufortunate expeditions of 
the Virginians and of Braddock, in which 
Washington was schooled for his future post. 
The critical years 1757-1758 saw regiments 
from the Northern colonies joining Aber- 
crombie and Lord Howe in their expedi- 
tion against Ticonderoga and Crown Point, 
while large quotas were sent from New En- 
gland to aid General Amherst in his attack 
on Louisbourg. There were thus scattered 
through the colonies numbers of officers and 
soldiers who had seen service. When the 
critical blow was struck, and Quebec be- 
came English — when, finally, by the peace 
of 1763, all the French territory in the North 
changed hands, and in the West the Mis- 
sissippi nearly to its mouth became the 
boundary between the two nationalities, we 
may easily believe that the colonies felt an 
increase of security, and would be the more 
ready to resist aggressions from the mother 
country because they stood in no fear of the 
power of France. 

Thus far we have seen historical causes 
preparing the colonies for self-government, 
on a certain plan, if ever the connection 
with the mother country should be broken. 
The declaration of independence and the 
war of the Revolution, after this prepara- 
tion, were owing to faults and blunders of 
the mother country, and to the political 
doctrines of the eighteenth century. Of 
this breach we will forbear to speak. To 
say little of it would be to do injustice to 
events so supremely important in our his- 
tory ; to say much of it would turn us aside 
from our main subject. The colonists had 



266 



THE EXPERIMENT OF THE UNION, WITH ITS PREPARATIONS. 



as much loyalty to the mother country as 
could justly be expected from men who had 
chiefly protected themselves, who had been 
denied their privileges as Englishmen, and 
had been used rather as sources of commer- 
cial benefit for Great Britain than helped 
in their progress toward becoming self- 
sustaining parts of the empire. The war 
was undertaken soberly, regretfully, with 
no side issues in view, and with no rancor 
toward England in the hearts of the peo- 
ple. This want of rancor is shown by the 
fact that many of the best officers, Wash- 
ington himself, Hamilton, Knox, and a host 
of others, remained English in their feel- 
ings, and were attached to the traditions 
of the mother country; and that the lead- 
ing civilians who had urged on rebellion, 
and had been the counselors of the country 
in the war, were afterward charged with 
undue partialities toward England. Prob- 
ably no revolution did its work with more 
conscientiousness, and fuller persuasion of 
its rightfulness on the part of the people, 
with less of a spirit of blood, with fewer 
bitter remembrances of the enemy, than 
this. It deserves to be noticed, as showing 
the sober temper of the war, that a regi- 
ment formed from volunteers in one part 
of a county took one of the parish minis- 
ters with them as their chaplain, as if it 
had been a church meeting adjourned to 
another place. 

It was a blessing for which we can never 
be too thankful that an experiment at con- 
stitution-making was set on foot in the war, 
and was tried long enough to show its de- 
fects, and point the way toward something 
better. It was nothing but a league of 
States, with no Executive, with one House 
in Congress, without a Supreme Court, with- 
out the power of regulating commerce with 
foreign countries or between the States. 
This last defect especially it was that de- 
manded a new instrument. Tbis new in- 
strument was made to remove difficulties 
which were felt; and, as Mr. Edward A. 
Freeman, in his history of confederations, 
justly remarks, was made in no conscious 
imitation of any other constitution. This 
learned and able historian of federal gov- 
ernments, writing in 1863, when he looked 
on the Union as permanently dissolved, 
says of it: "The American Union has actu- 



ally secured for what is really a long period 
of time a greater amount of combined peace 
and freedom than was ever before enjoyed 
by so large a portion of the earth's surface. 
There have been and still are vaster des- 
potic empires, but never before has so large 
an inhabited territory remaiued for more 
than seventy years in the enjoyment at 
once of internal freedom and of exemption 
from the scourge of war. Now this is the 
direct result of the federal system." If we 
have succeeded in making it clear that our 
present Constitution was almost an inevita- 
ble result of historical causes— that is, of 
Divine Providence — we shall be led to value 
it more than if we were to look on it as a 
product of successive workings of human 
wisdom. 

It is impossible that any constitution 
should at all times be equal in its bearing 
upon all interests and all parts of a coun- 
try, and equally impossible that it should 
not admit in some points two interpreta- 
tions. The parts of the country which were 
more devoted to trade wanted a strong gov- 
ernment ; the parts where the people lived 
within themselves, in the pursuits of agri- 
culture, felt in general less zeal for some im- 
provement on the old Confederation. There 
grew up naturally a jealousy of powers con- 
ferred on the common government as re- 
stricting and opposing the powers of the 
separate States ; with this the principle of 
strict construction of the Constitution of 
the United States was united; and thus 
two parties coeval with our present gov- 
ernment arose — the Federal, and the Repub- 
lican or Democratic. The former had a cer- 
tain leaning toward England, and dreaded 
the principles of the French revolutionists ; 
the other admired France and distrusted En- 
gland. After twelve years of control over 
public affairs, during the Presidencies of 
Washington and the elder Adams, the very 
upright party of the Federalists was driven 
out of power, partly in consequence of blun- 
ders and dissensions within itself, partly be- 
cause it did not fully understand the temper 
of the people, while a still greater blunder 
on the part of leading members of it in the 
Eastern States led to its final extinction. 

The Democratic party, under Southern 
leaders, held the government from the be- 
ginning of the century for sixty years, not 



THE DOCTRINE OF NULLIFICATION. 



267 



without internal differences and divisions, 
arising from sectional interests and other 
causes. As it often happens, the name 
rather than the essence of the original 
party was preserved ; new issues had driven 
out the old ones from the field of politics. 
Tariffs were altered from time to time, the 
Southern States being almost unanimous 
for free trade, and the North preponderating 
toward protection. Through all the changes 
the country flourished by emigration, by the 
rise of manufactures, in its marine, in its 
wealth. The great West, growing vaster in 
its dimensions, from the time of the purchase 
of Louisiana until it reached the Pacific 
coast, began to give signs of grasping at the 
hegemony and controlling the policy of the 
country. But meanwhile a spiritual cause, 
without power at first — a cloud no bigger 
than a man's hand — arose above the hori- 
zon. Slavery had been preached against by 
a few, protested against by the noblest of 
the Quakers from the days of John Wood- 
man, acknowledged by all to be unrighteous 
in itself, and yet was endured in the hope 
that emancipation at length would quietly 
dissolve a structure which ages had built 
up, and which could not fall without a re- 
construction of society. The cotton-gin 
and the ample lands of the Gulf States, in- 
cluding the latest acquisition. Texas, offer- 
ed it a boundless field to spread over, and 
opened the prospect, whenever a new State 
should be formed in which there was an ap- 
preciable infusion of the slave element, of 
new strength added to the Southern su- 
premacy. In the extreme South this was 
a smooth path toward supremacy, but was 
not so easy on the borders, where slave and 
white labor came together. As early as 
1820 the problems of the future developed 
themselves, at which time a dividing line 
was drawn by the Missouri Compromise be- 
tween the two interests. Next appeared 
the doctrine of nullification, and the at- 
tempt of the leading Southern State, South 
Carolina, to establish a practical check on 
the action of the general government by 
that of one of the States. It was maintained 
at first that there resided a power in each 
State of the confederation to judge whether 
a law of the United States was constitu- 
tional, and to resist within its own territory 
the operation of such laws as were judged 



to be otherwise. In 1832 an ordinance was 
passed declaring the tariff law " null, void, 
and no law," and forbidding duties on im- 
ports to be paid within its jurisdiction after 
a certain day in the near future. It so hap- 
pened that the President at this time was a 
Southern man of great popularity and of sin- 
gular energy, who not only felt that such a 
doctrine of nullification, if carried out, would 
be a death-blow to any union, and was en- 
tirely unconstitutional, but had personal 
reasons for doing his utmost to oppose it. 
In his opposition he carried for the time the 
greater part of the South with him ; it was 
understood that he was ready to use all the 
forces at his disposal in executing the law ; 
and the message on nullification which was 
issued in his name in 1833 was a most val- 
uable state paper in refutation of the doc- 
trine that a State has a right to decide for 
itself that the Constitution has been vio- 
lated, and so deciding, to secede from the 
Union or to declare a law void. 

The storm thus raised was blown over by 
the help of a tariff compromise, but the 
opinions already spoken of spread through 
the Slave States more and more, in a great- 
er ratio of increase, perhaps, than the prin- 
ciples of abolition and the political party 
founded upon them grew at the North and 
West. Here a controversy began which 
nothing — no prudence at the North, no de- 
nunciation, no interests of traffic — could 
put down. Every fugitive slave reclaimed 
added to the force of the feeling against 
slavery. Formerly it had been hoped that 
in time slavery would give way to serfdom, 
and in the end to full freedom ; but as the 
abolitionists appealed to the conscience and 
to our American theory of human rights, it 
was necessary to construct moral defenses 
on the other side. Instead of confessing 
the wrong of the institution, and asking for 
time to prepare for its abolition, it was sup- 
ported by the authority of Scripture ; it was 
the redemption of men from heathenism in 
Africa; it brought with it relations most 
kindly and humane between an abject race 
and an enlightened one ; it kept out much 
of the vice too easily discoverable in the 
cities of the Free States. This was the be- 
ginning, evidently, of the last phase of the 
controversy between the two parts and two 
interests in the country ; for how could there 



268 



THE EXPERIMENT OF THE UNION, WITH ITS PREPARATIONS. 



be any compromise when sncli diametrically 
opposite sides were taken ? And as the foes 
of slavery grew bolder, the apprehension of 
what might come to pass at some future day 
grew stronger among its friends. Perhaps, 
too, they must have been aware, and have 
half confessed to themselves, that whether 
their pleas on behalf of their institution 
were tenable or not, there was an incon- 
sistency between the apologies and those 
fundamental notions which the whole Un- 
ion once avowed. It was too evident also 
that there must be a division, affecting all 
questions of politics, and becoming more 
pronounced from year to year, growing out 
of this question of questions, which could 
be neither settled nor avoided. 

We pass by transactions of great impor- 
tance, such as the affairs in Kansas and the 
question of slavery in the Territories, and 
come down to the opening of the war. Why 
was it, when Southern men and Southern 
interests had controlled the country for gen- 
erations, when the North and West were di- 
vided, and probably would always continue 
so, that the die was cast in 1860 for secession 
and dissolution ? The Presidential election 
had been far from a decided expression of 
public will, and wise adjustments taken in 
time might at least have delayed a disrup- 
tion. There were, as it seems to us, two 
leading causes. First, the progress of ideas, 
and the prospect of an increase in the fu- 
ture of the number of Free States, without 
any counterbalancing weights in the other 
scale, were sure to fix the policy of the coun- 
try for the future. Secondly, the temper 
of the Northern States was not well under- 
stood, just as at the North the South was 
thought to be threatening rather than pur- 
posing. It was supposed that the North 
could not act as a unit nor by great major- 
ities, and that a party against the war would 
paralyze the movements of the government. 
Even the North had some distrust of itself. 
This is not the first instance in which great 
masses of men have failed to comprehend 
each other or themselves, nor will it be the 
last. But it was found that the preserva- 
tion of the Union, all over the North and 
West, had an importance attached to it in 
men's minds which had not been thought 
to exist. Nor was it the commercial value 
of the Union that seemed so precious, as if 



the navigation of the Mississippi, the free 
intercourse, as before, in every direction 
through the whole territory, needed to be 
maintained at all hazards, but it was the 
Union as an idea, and as involving the fu- 
ture peace of this laud for generations. In 
the spring of 1862 the writer of these words 
was standing on the highlands above Cin- 
cinnati, and looking over toward the Ken- 
tucky side of the Ohio. Then first a deep 
impression was made on his mind of the ter- 
rible results likely to follow disruption, for 
the line of that great river would divide 
free soil from slavery for hundreds of miles. 
And when the boundary should be fixed, 
who would or could prevent fugitive slaves 
from crossing it ? Who would not resist 
their pursuing masters? Who could pre- 
vent a thousand border difficulties which 
might give rise to war ? Wherever the two 
republics met there would be desolation or 
chronic warfare, obstructing the prosperity 
of some of the fairest regions in the world ; 
there would be bitterness and national ha- 
tred ; a blight would come over vast tracts, 
unless, perhaps, by slow degrees, slavery 
should restrict its limits, and allow its an- 
tagonist to encroach on its domains. Nor 
were such evils in the future worse than 
the loss of a great Union over which one 
constitution reigned, where common princi- 
ples of justice were supreme. Such feelings 
were found in multitudes of minds; but they 
could not partake of them who had clung 
to their State as the highest object of their 
pride and allegiance. 

The war had its course. At its close the 
problems offering themselves for solution 
were nearly as grave as the problem with 
which it began, and more difficult. The 
Union had been saved at the cost of over- 
throwing society at the South, and now 
the question of reconstruction came before 
the country under conditions which de- 
manded the highest wisdom and modera- 
tion. A new race was called into political 
existence : the slaves had been turned into 
freemen. What was to be their political 
status ? If they should have no voice in 
public affairs — if they, while acquiring civil 
rights, should stand by and see the most ig- 
norant of the whites voting and determin- 
ing State politics and making constitutions, 
what would be their security for the future ? 



CONFLICT OF RACES IN THE SOUTH. 



269 



If, on the other hand, political power were 
given to all indiscriminately, blacks and 
whites, the evil might he as great. What 
a strange state of things to bestow the fran- 
chise on immense multitudes who had not 
the knowledge requisite to vote intelligent- 
ly for the lowest local magistrates, who 
could be combiued into a party which black 
or white demagogues could mould and guide 
according to their will, and against whom 
it might be necessary for the whites to 
form an opposite combination in order to 
save themselves from ruin ! Never, perhaps, 
since the world began was there such a 
dreadful alternative on so large a scale. 
Above all was this true in those States 
where the numbers of the races were nearly 
equal, or where the blacks were even in a 
majority. In the process of reconstruction 
it was managed that the suffrage should be 
granted to this race wherever States con- 
taining slaves had joined in the secession ; 
and a new motive for conceding the suf- 
frage was supplied by the Fourteenth Amend- 
ment to the Constitution, which provides 
that representation in Congress shall de- 
pend on the number of active or fully quali- 
fied citizens. Thus suppose the number of 
male inhabitants of a State over twenty- 
one years of age to amount to 150,000, and 
one-third of them to be disfranchised by an 
amendment of its constitution on account 
of want of sufficient property — which dis- 
qualification would chiefly affect the ne- 
groes — the representative quota for Con- 
gress must be dimiuished by one -third. 
Few States would be willing to submit to 
this reduction of political power in the gen- 
eral government, and so, probably, it will 
never take place, if otherwise it were prac- 
ticable. We regard the Fifteenth Article 
of the Amendments as most just and de- 
sirable, namely, that rights shall not be 
abridged on account of " race, color, or pre- 
vious condition of servitude ;" but in the 
constitutions of the restored States, and by 
the Fourteenth Amendment, universal suf- 
frage in its worst shape, with its worst con- 
sequences, is fastened, perhaps necessarily, 
but unfortunately, on these restored re- 
publics. 

This condition of things is now one of the 
worst evils that we suffer. We concede that 
it may have been necessary, but that docs 



not take from the dangers which attend 
upon it. We will look at some of these 
dangers, disclaiming most solemnly all party 
motives or wishes in what we are to say. 
The greatest of them all is that the two 
races, through the States where slavery for- 
merly existed, will be separated by party 
lines, and will look on one another with re- 
ciprocal distrust. '.Sectional differences are 
bad enough, as we have found in our past 
history, even when able men managed the 
parties ; but differences of race, intensified 
by the jealousies and distrusts of politics, 
are tenfold worse.'^) In the present case they 
tend to increase in intensity and bitterness, 
because the ignorant mass that has just 
been rescued from slavery must fall under 
the influence of fear of what will happen 
if the management of State affairs passes 
over permanently into the hands of their 
adversaries. They feel their weakness ; they 
have inferior power of combination ; they 
have small means of self-protection. They 
are also to a considerable extent under the 
influence of cunning leaders who seem to 
have unlimited power of acting on their 
fears. Brawls will unavoidably break out 
in many neighborhoods, which will grow 
into feuds and local quarrels, and will in re- 
port be magnified or extenuated, as it may 
happen, in their importance, so that the 
country will not know what to believe or 
disbelieve in regard to them. As for the 
blame to be imputed to the one or the other 
side, that is a small matter. We do not be- 
lieve that the colored race or their leaders 
of like origin would bo or have been the 
first to encroach on the rights of the white 
race. And we wish that one could not be- 
lieve that there has been & policy or under- 
standing on the part of many leading whites 
in some of the States in question to the ef- 
fect that the colored people must be pre- 
vented by terrorism from enjoying the bene- 
fits granted to them in the new amendments. 
But the evils to which we refer lie outside 
of the immediate occasions of strife between 
the races ; it will reach beyond existing par- 
ties. How can there be harmony between 
them under any future division of parties, 
when, in addition to difference of race, dis- 
trust, suspicion, past feuds and antagonisms, 
will continually foment disquiet ? If it be 
said that unprincipled whites are corrupt- 



270 



THE EXPERIMENT OF THE UNION, WITH ITS PREPARATIONS. 



ing the blacks arid poisoning their minds, 
it may be very true, but how is the nuisance 
to be abated ? Will not the eagles be gath- 
ered together where the carcass is ? In brief, 
the cause of all that has taken place or is 
to be apprehended lies not in particular or 
local provocations, nor in the leaders of to- 
day, nor in the imbittering of a most mild 
and inoffensive race by the war, but it is 
one that is likely to last as long as meas- 
ures, now never to be set aside, shall have 
run their course and borne their fruits. 
" The end is not yet." 

Until this state of things shall end, if end 
it can, this unhappy part of our Union, in- 
jured in its property, with its old landhold- 
ers impoverished or driven from their homes, 
with its institutions shattered, must lag far 
behind the other parts in most of the essen- 
tials of prosperity. That section is full of 
undeveloped resources : its exhaustless beds 
of iron and coal, its soil yet unbroken, or 
capable of vastly increased production, its 
mild climate, must invite capital and labor, 
if those timid forces could be assured of 
safety and protection. LPerhaps the solu- 
tion of the problem for the South may come 
from this source, from a new emigration not 
compromised in old strifes, and able to act 
in the end as a mediating and a reconciling 
power. J 

We pass on to another source of danger 
which the late war has opened up, or at 
least made more apparent — to the increased 
power of the general government. We have 
already had occasion to speak of the subject 
of the powers given by the present Constitu- 
tion to the United States as exciting alarm 
in many, and as giving occasion to the birth 
of the old Republican or Democratic party. 
But, as it often happens in politics, that 
party, when it came into power, was not 
faithful to its convictions or principles. 
Thus, when the purchase of Louisiana was 
opposed by the Federalists as being a stretch 
of the Constitution, this was not wholly de- 
nied by the Democrats, but justified by the 
circumstances of the case. Thus, too, in the 
war of 1812, when the Federal Governors of 
the New England coast States, while con- 
senting to furnish the quotas of militia call- 
ed for, claimed to judge when an actual in- 
vasion of their soil had taken place, and 
refused to put the troops under officers of 



the United States, pleading their unques- 
tioned rights under the Constitution and 
the law, the anti-Federal party, then hav- 
ing the government in their hands, de- 
nounced this action as disloyal and uncon- 
stitutional. Further, the Hartford Conven- 
tion — an innocent scheme with an ugly look 
— was taxed with treasonable or disloyal 
designs, although without good reason ; and 
yet the secession in 1861 justified itself by 
this unwise measure of a party which the 
States joining in the secession had for that 
very measure strongly denounced. But aft- 
er the Peace of Ghent the parties returned 
to their original principles, or, rather — as 
one of them had nearly expired, aud the 
other was divided within itself on questions 
of sectional interest — the parts of the coun- 
try where they had respectively predomi- 
nated went back to the old positions of a 
stricter and a freer interpretation of the 
Constitution, to the Federal and the States- 
rights theories. In the interval between 
that peace and the attack on Fort Sumter 
things ran commonly in the States-rights 
channel. The general government seemed 
to be weak ; and foreigners, as they specula- 
ted on our government in those days, thought 
that the great danger was that State power 
weighed most in the balance. It is true that 
the Supreme Court put a curb on the acts of 
several of the States, and that General Jack- 
son would undoubtedly have crushed nulli- 
fication by armed force if necessary ; but his 
vigorous measures only put off the operation 
of a theory which even then involved the 
power of a State to secede from the Union. 
Yet even while the general government 
was regarded as weak in conflict with the 
State power, it showed an increase of 
strength of an indirect sort in the way of 
patronage and of influence on private per- 
sons. The appointments within the gift of 
the Executive grew in value and number, 
and already, if we mistake not, members of 
Congress had begun to regard it as their 
right to nominate to offices within their dis- 
tricts, to be the President's almoners, if we 
may give that name to their business. Still 
this accumulating power was rather politic- 
al than governmental ; it would not have 
excused the Executive of the United States 
from transcending the constitutional limits; 
it was strictly constitutioual, although used 



THE STRENGTH OF THE EXECUTIVE. 



271 



for party purposes. If the framers of our in- 
strument for uuitiug the country could have 
had a vivid impression of its vast extent, 
they would perhaps have put some check 
on the appointing power. But they built 
the house without dreaming how many serv- 
ants the large family would require. 

The appointing power is a means to an 
end, to the reward of partisans, and those 
the neediest generally and the most selfish. 
As such it is corrupting, and the interests 
involved in it are strong enough to resist all 
attempts at reformation. Its bad influences 
on party and on personal honor can not be 
removed without some change in the Con- 
stitution, and such change party feeling it- 
self would resist. The ill success of civ- 
il service reform is mortifying enough, and 
disheartening for the future. 

The strength of the government, looked 
at apart from its indirect influences, never 
appeared formidable until the war called it 
fully forth. Then first the Executive seem- 
ed to have a new quality, which might be 
compared with the dictatorial power con- 
ferred by the Senate of Rome on the consuls 
in the well-known formula that they do 
their best to prevent the republic from suf- 
fering any detriment. Then first the com- 
mand of immense armies, the arrests of sus- 
pected persons, the control over vast sums 
of money, the arbitrary use of telegraphs, 
and, after the war was over, the government 
of the Southern States by military officers, 
and the reconstruction of those States, re- 
vealed an accumulation of authority which 
was unsuspected before, and pointed to a 
possible military despotism in the future. 
Then, too, the power that Congress author- 
ized of suspending specie payments and 
issuing legal tenders showed that in emer- 
gencies financial measures could be set on 
foot which could involve the country in un- 
told distress, and even in bankruptcy. Since 
the war, also, the disturbed condition of one 
of the Southern States has induced the Pres- 
ident, on his own responsibility, to use mili- 
tary power in a case of very doubtful con- 
stitutionality, to say the least, and to inter- 
fere for the restoration of order in a way 
that can not be justified. The upright in- 
tentions of the Chief Magistrate we do not 
intend to question ; the subject, interesting 
as it is, concerns us only because a very 



dangerous precedent may be set for the fu- 
ture. The question may be asked, and is 
asked, whether there is any danger of mili- 
tary despotism. And as this could not 
exist without consolidation, it can be ask- 
ed, also, Is not consolidation, which, at the 
founding of the republic, one party dread- 
ed, and would have prevented by constitu- 
tional limitations if the other had thought 
it more than a bare possibility — is not this 
to be the ultimate goal of our Union? 
This is what those who look at us with no 
sympathy for our institutions profess to re- 
gard as a future probability. Within a 
few months we have seen the following ex- 
pression in a foreign paper commenting on 
affairs in Louisiana : " The President is ex- 
hibiting how easily a military despotism 
could be built on American institutions." 
Thus the same Constitution which a few 
years ago, as looked at through foreign 
spectacles, could not resist the weak power 
of the States, or bring back a recalcitrant 
Governor into his proper relations to the 
general government, is now allowing, it is 
said, the general government and the " one- 
man power" in it to trample on the rights 
of the States, and to threaten the extinction 
of liberty. Do these opposite charges, made 
at different times, refute one another, or is 
there a real and a new danger before us, 
and that, too, when the army of the United 
States does not contain one soldier for every 
thousand of the inhabitants of the country ? 
So great a change as that from our pres- 
ent Constitution to an imperial despotism, 
or, in other words, to an absolute democ- 
racy under one man, may not seem to many 
worthy of serious apprehension ; and we 
share this opinion so far as to think that, 
in itself considered, a revolution so great, 
so without precedent in the English race, is 
entirely improbable. Before it could be ef- 
fected there would need to be a strong party 
in favor of it diffused through all quarters 
of the Union. No sectional dissatisfaction 
would be adequate to bring it about. To 
attempt it would involve the probability of 
two or more confederacies, and of a war be- 
tween them with an uncertain issue. To 
effect it would require taxation on a vast 
scale, or the borrowing of money to such an 
extent as would involve speedy bankruptcy. 
There are now no questions on which the 



272 



THE EXPERIMENT OF THE UNION, WITH ITS PREPARATIONS. 



Union could be territorially divided without 
the uprisiug of a great majority against a 
small minority. Capital, in its connections 
all over the land, is a bond of union. Tlie 
mouth and course of the Mississippi, the 
avenues to the Pacific, the communication 
with Europe by Atlantic ports, must be open 
to all. An empire on the coast seems equal- 
ly impossible with a great interior empire. 
The ouly cause of essential change that 
seems deserviug of being taken into ac- 
count is a general loss of reverence on the 
part of thinking men for the institutions of 
the country, a wide-spread conviction that 
we have failed in our experiment. When- 
ever such a humiliating day shall arrive, 
the same conviction might lead toward 
peaceable reforms and modifications ; but a 
military despotism, after the experience of 
France and Rome, and with the political 
leanings of our race, is not likely to be one 
of them. 

It is, however, possible, we admit, that at- 
tempts may be made to substitute laws of 
the Union for State laws in some very im- 
portant departments of legislation, and that 
in case of their success the prestige aud effi- 
ciency of the general government would be 
greatly increased, to the detriment of State 
power. Some of us are old enough to re- 
member the time when the Cumberland 
Road was a bone of contention between 
strict and free constructionists ; but now 
the talk is to put all telegraphs aud all 
railroads under the supervision of the Unit- 
ed States, as, with far less constitutional 
objection, banks of issue sustain relations 
to the States no longer. It might also 
be highly advantageous if in the depart- 
ment of international (or, if such a word 
might bo allowed, interstate) private law 
harmony could be introduced, which could 
be effected ouly by general agreement be- 
tween the States, or by an alteration of the 
Constitution which should invest Cougress 
with uew law-making powers. The laws 
concerning marriage, legitimacy, divorce, be- 
quests, guardianship, the rights of married 
women, aud the rights of aliens ought ra- 
tionally to be uniform through the Union. 
This is the direction, as we understand, that 
the constitution of Switzerland is taking. 
From a loose confederation it became a 
strict one, a " Bundesstaat," and now still 



newer powers in legislation are to be or 
have been conferred on the central govern- 
ment. But what we dread is that the Union 
is becoming so great a tree, with such thick 
foliage, that the States, like shrubs, will 
lose their healthy growth under its shade ; 
that instead of being protected, they will 
wither. If we look at government patron- 
age, already so vast a factor in all political 
calculations and bargains, and add the pos- 
sible enlargement of the sphere of United 
States law, demanded with the more reason 
on account of the great number of the States, 
and then bring into account the sway of an 
ambitious man at the head of the govern- 
ment takiug advantage of some local diffi- 
culty, we shall not regard the anti-Federalist 
dread of consolidation as wildly unreasona- 
ble. Washington and Hamilton, with their 
compeers, were right in wanting a stronger 
government in place of the shackling old 
Confederation. That was the only sound 
statesmanship at that time. But when a 
measure of Mr. Jefferson's enlarged our do- 
main, and set the precedent for an immense 
further enlargement, the danger took anoth- 
er direction. The very party which felt the 
apprehension set causes at work which alone 
made it to be reasonably apprehended. There 
is now possibility enough of such enormous 
powers being accumulated at Washington 
as ought to make men look narrowly at that 
tendency. For our part, at the present, we 
should rather endure some inconveniences 
from hasty or ill-considered laws of some 
State or States than seek a cure which 
might itself be a source of ill. We would 
print e pluribus in as large letters as unum. 
At this point of our progress we pause a 
moment to make the remark that we owe 
our protection against the tendency to con- 
solidation to our historical development. 
The settlement of the country in the first 
instance by separate colonies, which were 
kept apart long enough to form distinct 
characteristics aud to feel their independ- 
ence each of the rest — this is obviously the 
force that resists perfect fusion and com- 
pactness. The nice balance aimed at in 
the Constitution may not last through all 
changes in society and in public interests ; 
the scale that holds the rights of the Union 
and that which holds State power may al- 
ternately outweigh each other ; but the true 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE. 



273 



lover of his country will aim to keep them 
as far as possible in equipoise. Meanwhile, 
if uniform legislation is demanded on points 
where all the States ought to have one pol- 
icy, let it be reached by a common under- 
standing. But surely the end of a war, when 
State power fell into the background, and 
the Union was, as it ought to have been, 
prominent before the eyes of all, is no time 
to carry the old Federal principle to an ex- 
treme which the venerated founders of the 
Union never contemplated. 

The danger of consolidation, if there be 
any, is future, and must be the result of 
slowly moving causes, of long misgovern- 
nient, and of a demand for more energy and 
uniformity in our system. The dangers 
which many fear and have feared from the 
democratic cast of our institutions are, if 
real, more immediate, because universal suf- 
frage is upon us, aud can never be gotten 
rid of as long as the country shall endure. 
The history of the extension of the suffrage 
in this country since the independence is a 
very instructive one, if it could be set forth 
in detail. It is sufficient here to say that 
most, if not all, the older colonies had at 
that time in their laws a qualification for 
voting based on the possession of land, 
which continued in many of them long 
afterward. By degrees this became a form, 
that is, young men who wished to become 
qualified for votiug received deeds of laud, 
which were reconveyed soon after the elec- 
tion to the friend who had helped them. 
At length all native-born white males twen- 
ty-one years old could vote, on taking the 
freeman's oath, after a certain brief term of 
residence in a State or town. Then natu- 
ralized citizens received the same privilege. 
Meanwhile free blacks, who at one time 
could vote even in some of the slave-holding 
States, as North Carolina, were deprived of 
their privileges in some of those which held 
no slaves ; such was the case in New York 
and Connecticut, in the latter of which 
States a colored man of great personal 
worth, the owner of a considerable proper- 
ty, was disfranchised by the constitution 
of 1817. Now at length every where, if we 
mistake not, colored persons are put on an 
equality with whites, and naturalized for- 
eigners with persons native born. The sin- 
gle exception known to the writer is the 
18 



limitation of suffrage in Connecticut to 
those who are able to read — a rule by which 
almost no one is excluded. So generally is 
it held that citizenship and the right of suf- 
frage are co-extensive that the first now 
passes with the greater part of Americans as a 
natural right, like the right of property or of 
contract. There are very many who believe 
that the earlier state of things was far bet- 
ter, but very few who believe that the pres- 
ent state of things will ever be altered. We 
must carry it with us through all our na- 
tional existence, and endeavor to educate 
all voters into the ability to judge what is 
best, aud into the spirit of conscientious citi- 
zenship ; meanwhile, accepting the situation, 
we may look at the evils which it brings 
with it. These are more apparent in large 
towns, while in the country a restriction of 
the suffrage would make little difference. 
They are increased by the habit of many 
substantial citizens of staying away from 
the polls, either owing to a kind of despair 
on account of the small influence of a single 
vote, or to the engrossing interests of busi- 
ness. And thus whatever be the bad re- 
sults, the higher classes of society are in a 
good degree responsible for them. They 
are increased also by the number of foreign- 
born voters, who can be led in masses by 
their more intelligent countrymen, and who 
thus render possible a number of inferior 
demagogues ready to sell votes for offices, 
and able to make themselves necessary to 
their parties. In this way differences of na- 
tionality are perpetuated long after aliens 
have become naturalized ; and even the di- 
visions in their old homes across the water 
survive their changes of abode. It is sure- 
ly a most unnatural thing that there should 
be in communities where rights are the same 
for men of every kind of nativity these po- 
litical sects, depending on something re- 
nounced and abandoned. Nor could we 
find such parties within parties, carried 
down even to the second or third genera- 
tion, unless the means of combinatiou lay 
within the power of men who have their 
own ends in view. The voters themselves 
have no need to unite for self-protection 
against native-born Americans, either for 
relief in taxation or for securing their priv- 
ileges in other respects. It is the interest 
of all that these foreigu-born citizens should 



274 



THE EXPERIMENT OF THE UNION, WITH ITS PREPARATIONS. 



grow rich, that their children should be well 
educated, that all places of trust should be 
opeu to them, when they are found worthy 
of political or social houors. 
f_Here, then, is one danger and source of 
peril, that while native Americans act po- 
litically as individuals, the naturalized citi- 
zens act in masses under demagogues as 
their leaders, as if they were iuvading ar- 
mies rather than men seeking for homes 
and for quiet. Only in one instance have 
native-born citizens formed a political par- 
ty, and the ignominious failure in this case 
showed that it was unnatural and outland- 
ish. Of the religious factor in massing cer- 
tain classes of men together we have a 
word to say soon; we add at present the 
single remark that these demagogical influ- 
ences retard the assimilation of the new- 
comers to the old, and prevent the com- 
plete harmony of the people?) 

In this state of things, to which universal 
suffrage gives rise, one party, at any one 
given time, will naturally attract the dema- 
gogues more than the other; that is, one 
will be, or affect to be, more in sympathy 
with the foreigner or the poor, or with lib- 
erty and equal rights; the other, more in 
sympathy with the interests of property 
and civil order. Both may be intensely self- 
ish and equally one-sided. But they can 
not co-exist without acting on one another. 
They discover each the other's arts, means 
of success, and projects. Naturally they 
try to counteract plans by similar plans of 
a questionable character. They make plat- 
forms on which they do not intend to stand. 
They propose candidates who are ignorant 
or pliable, instead of tbose who are sturdy 
and experienced in legislation. There must 
be understandings that such and such per- 
sons of service to a party are to be reward- 
ed in due time. These and many more of 
the obvious evils of parties, such as the cau- 
cus system, unanimity forced by the whip, 
as it were, discreditable compromises, are 
either owing to the universality of suffrage 
or are greatly increased by it ; and there is 
no present prospect of their discontinuance. 
We make no complaint of parties as such ; 
they are necessary and useful in a free state; 
they act as watchmen and as checks upon 
each other ; but we maintain that the more 
ignorant the constituencies are, the greater 



is the tendency on their part to misplaced 
confidence in designing men, to jealousy and 
strife of classes, to the election of inferior 
politicians, to the turning of politics into a 
trade, to misgovernment, and, in our case at 
least, to the banding together of emigrants 
into factions founded on their nationalities. 
Nor do we mean to charge the mass of voters 
in the country with political corruption, 
which would be a slander. They want 
good government ; they are ready for sacri- 
fices, as we saw only a few years since; 
they have no direct interest in the results 
which they procure; they are in great meas- 
ure far less open to bribes than the political 
leaders themselves. The great evil is that, 
without intending or foreseeing it, they 
raise up a crop of politicians who are strik- 
ingly unlike the mass of such as elect them, 
and who are fast bringing the name and 
work of a statesman into contempt. 

But if the extent of the suffrage has so 
much to do with the degeneracy of political 
men, and if this can never be abridged, what 
remedy is there, and what need to talk of 
the evils? The remedies must be applied 
in detail, or they must be such as will grow 
out of a greater general intelligence, espe- 
cially on subjects of political science, or 
there must be an increased moral and re- 
ligious purity, which will work a cure of 
our evils in an indirect way. Of these gen- 
eral remedies we don't intend to speak. We 
simply remark that here and there a cure 
can be applied to some of the most glaring 
evils. If our Legislatures have been ex- 
posed to temptations by special legislation, 
a remedy can be applied, as has been done 
in the amended constitutions of several largo 
States, by taking away to a great extent 
from these bodies the power of granting 
special incorporations; if the towns, as has 
been done, abuse their charters, and come 
under the control of venal, corrupt men, 
their powers can be abridged or controlled ; 
if judges, as now elected in many States, are 
inferior men, for this too, it is to be hoped, 
a cure may be provided. The whole power 
of burdening States and towns with debt, 
as well as the taxing power, ought to have 
limits set for them in the States by public 
law. 

We are reminded here of another danger 
which is thought to be threatened by an in- 



FINANCIAL PERILS. 



275 



flux of foreigners. This land, once almost 
exclusively Protestant, is the refuge now of 
five millions of Catholics, more or les9. It is 
odd enough that some of those very people 
who saw in four millions of slaves a provi- 
dence bringing them within the influence 
of Christianity, now see a frowning provi- 
dence providing these Catholics a home in 
a land founded and nourished by Protest- 
ant principles. There may be great hopes 
of converting this country to the mediaeval 
religion. That religion will, of course, grow 
by natural increase, and causes new in our 
age may aid it, although what the Pope's 
newly developed infallibility will have to 
do with it we fail to see. Of this we are 
sure, that if any new vigor and spread of 
the Catholic faith, any aggressive action, 
should appear in this country, it would unite 
all Protestants of all hues more than any 
thing else could do, and would probably 
promote among them a catholic spirit far 
more than it would promote Catholicism out- 
side of them. 

Other evils which usher in this second 
century of our national existence arise from 
the late war and the financial measures of 
the government. The war was undertaken, 
we are proud to say, without bitterness, in 
a spirit of loyalty toward the Union, and 
with a deep sense of the immeuso evils of a 
permanent disruption. Never was a war 
marked to a greater degree by compassion 
for the wounded or by a more merciful treat- 
ment of prisoners than this of ours. And 
when did a nation, of its own accord, with- 
out the force of treaty, forgive the authors 
of a war more generously — we might say, 
with more dangerous forgetfulness of inju- 
ries? All classes who are not ordinarily 
roused to excitement by a sense of wrong 
joined in supporting it. The vast body of 
the religious people of the North and West 
felt its necessity and justice. Never did 
prayer for the country arise to the God of 
nations more unceasingly and more fervent- 
ly ; never did men, especially at the West, 
risk their lives with a fuller conviction of 
the rightfulness of the struggle. Such a 
war, like all wars, might have evils attend- 
ing it. Some of the officers may have en- 
tered the service to better their political 
chances in the future ; looseness of life and 
of principle may have been learned by a 



few; the obligations of the citizen may have 
been unlearned by a few more. But it is 
certain, we think, that if the war had ended 
without leaving any other besides its own 
direct evils, its bearing on life and manners 
would have been, on the whole, good. Cer- 
tainly the winning side, as it looks back on 
the morality of its cause and of the meas- 
ures for making it victorious, has no reason 
for shame. 

But war can not stand alone : Mars and 
Mercury must go together ; and the con- 
trivances of the latter to raise money are 
more than a counterbalance to the blunt 
honesty of the former. Whether the war 
could have been waged without a suspen- 
sion of specie payments, whether there were 
not reasons which justified that measure, 
aside from the financial ones, we will not 
stop to ask. Our work is to look at facts 
and their issues. The fact is that irredeem- 
able paper and a vast debt, beyond all 
power of payment for years to come, were 
introduced ; and as the ease of carrying on 
the measures of government for the time 
banished anxiety, the ultimate difficulties 
were not duly weighed. At the beginning 
of the war there was a general settling of 
balances between debtor and creditor; the 
money so returned to its owners was lent to 
the government ; and when the bonds of 
the public debt had increased in value, and 
the confidence of capitalists abroad in our 
securities was restored, these were sold at 
an advantage to parties across the water. 
Meanwhile, especially after the end of the 
war, new enterprises were begun, some of 
them immense in extent ; new debts be- 
tween individuals were contracted ; private 
persons were eager to go into enterprises 
which promised large returns ; banks were 
willing to lend to speculators and stock- 
jobbers ; every body wanted to get rich 
without labor or capital. Had there been 
no suspension of specie payments, but little 
of all this could have taken place; had 
there been an honest, intelligent attempt 
after the return of peace to resume specie 
payment at some future day, with the right 
machinery for it, instead of the puerile 
measures that were actually adopted, the 
country might now be rejoicing that the 
unavoidable crisis had passed over, and 
might look with rational confidence toward 



276 THE EXPERIMENT OF THE UNION, WITH ITS PREPARATIONS. 



the future. But this was too great an ef- 
fort for a speculating generation, too great 
for political leaders. Nearly the whole of 
our present evils, except those which arise 
from the reconstruction of the Southern 
States and the character of political advent- 
urers in that uncertain field, are the direct 
or indirect results of the coudition of the 
currency, of the fluctuations in the value 
of specie as measured by the legal tender. 
To this we must ascribe a large part of the 
speculations of recent years, the necessary 
reactions, failures, and shrinking of values, 
the depression of the mercantile community 
in consequence of greater economy on the 
part of consumers, and the dread of the fu- 
ture. To this are owing in a measure the 
vast fortunes acquired since the war began, 
the power of great houses to depress and 
drive out of the field smaller ones, the im- 
mense extravagance and show, the almost 
contempt for the virtues of thrift, modera- 
tion, and forethought — virtues so important 
and efficient as even in heathen lands or 
under bad governments to secure a happy, 
unaspiring middle class. To this, again, 
we must refer the uneasiness and strikes of 
laborers, at least in part, and the general 
feeling pervading the producers in one sec- 
tion of the country that they are oppress- 
ed by transporters, and can by legislation 
change the laws of profits. To this, too, 
in large part, we must attribute that in- 
tensely excited worldliness which appears 
on all sides; those frequent outbreaks of 
crime, especially of dishonesty, which will 
soon be regarded as matters of course ; that 
venality, that want of honor, which are in- 
juring our principles as well as our reputa- 
tion. 

These last vices call for more extended 
consideration, for just now they are imputed 
to the legislature of the nation. Formerly 
if there was a member of Congress who 
came there with "itching palms," he could 
do but little in the way of gratifying his 
propensity. There was nothing to steal; 
there was no chance for corrupt bargains, 
and there was little suspicion of corrupt 
practice. Our poverty was our integrity. 
The new state of things is mainly owing, 
not to a lower set of men brought into the 
sen ice of the country as legislators, not to 
the unwillingness of Congress itself to ferret 



corruption out, but to the means held in 
the hands of great corporations to influence 
votes. These means, again, are owing main- 
ly to the financial condition of the country ; 
and if there be increased venality — that is, 
if Congressmen half a century ago would 
have resisted similar temptations — this, 
again, is mainly owing to the overstimulus 
of the covetous spirit which the last ten or 
twelve years have engendered. 

The suspicions felt in regard to the hon- 
esty and honor of Congress have derived 
strength from what has become known and 
what has not been discovered. At first 
there seemed to be an unwillingness to 
probe an ulcer; then the facts that came 
to light, while revealing crime on the part 
of a few, involved many in suspicion ; and 
finally the disclosures of the winter of 1874- 
75 made it seem as if the money paid to 
agents at Washington for a subsidy to a line 
of steamboats must have passed into many 
hands. Here, then, we have guilt charged 
on a very few, suspicion resting on many: 
and this is just the worst state of things 
possible. If forty members of a political 
body were found to have taken bribes and 
were expelled, it would be better for the 
country or State than if five were detected 
and two hundred were under suspicion, al- 
though the suspicion might be wholly 
groundless ; for a general distrust of men 
in public stations is most disheartening and 
demoralizing. Unj ust doubt of human char- 
acter in general destroys the motives to 
probity arising from example, if it be not 
already the fruit of a corrupt heart. 

And here we can not refrain from saying 
a word on the conduct of public journals as 
it respects the charges against public men. 
Our leading journals contain men in their 
editorial corps who may compare advan- 
tageously with any members of Congress. 
But some of them, in their anxiety to give 
the first news, are not equally anxious to 
find out whether it be true or not; they 
trust too implicitly to the reports of corre- 
spondents ; or they have, perhaps, grudges 
which make them unfair. To be fair would 
be to be moderate. It would not do to be 
gentlemanly, for strong words would need 
to be weighed. When we read the vilifica- 
tions of Congress and other political bodies, 
one thing at least we are sure of, that the 



NEED OF POLITICAL REFORM. 



277 



writers ought to be believers in the doc- 
trine of total depravity, for seldom were 
such charges made even by stiff Calvinists 
against individual men as these journals, 
otherwise most respectable, sometimes make 
upon large bodies of leading politicians. It 
is much to be regretted that individual 
character should be attacked without the 
best reasons ; for while it is of very little 
importance that this or that man keeps his 
hold on the public confidence, it is of im- 
mense importance that our representative 
system should be trusted in. When that is 
thought to be venal we lose the hope of 
good government, and our reverence for in- 
stitutions, so much prized once, vanishes ; 
we become ashamed of our country, make a 
feebler resistance to causes of disorganiza- 
tion, and fall into despair. 

In asking ourselves what means lie with- 
in our reach that we may recover ourselves 
from evils partly temporary, partly arising 
out of our political system, we look first at 
the possibility that the sentiment of honor 
may be purified and quickened. It has been 
thought by De Tocqueville that for the 
growth of honor in a country there must be 
men of rank and birth, who are enabled by 
their position and traditions to know what 
is honorable, and who would sink into con- 
tempt within their own class if they fell be- 
low the standard. To the English idea of 
honor belong especially the virtues of cour- 
age, truth, and straightforwardness ; or more 
generally honor consists in a nice sense of 
personal rights, of that which is due to oth- 
ers and owed by them to ourselves. Is it 
too much to hope that a noble and manly 
literature in the future may raise the stand- 
ard of character through the whole people, 
so that a truckling, deceitful, dodging poli- 
tician shall be thoroughly despised on nil 
sides, and be obliged to renounce his po- 
litical hopes on account of his meannesses ? 
Is it too much to hope that such a principle 
of honor, without the pride that often goes 
with it, may be incorporated into our law 
of social morality; aud that religion, which 
has a most intimate and inseparable con- 
nection Avith genuine morality, may take up 
this principle also, and may leaven society 
with it, so that a trick or a lie may be utter- 
ly abhorred by merchants, by politicians, by 
young men entering into life, by all who 



can corrupt others or be corrupted them- 
selves ? O for more men in public life 
with the character of him of whom the poet 
speaks : 

" Who never sold the truth to serve the hour, 
Nor paltered with Eternal God for power ; 
Who let the turbid streams of rumor flow 
Through either babbling world of high or low; 
Who never spoke against a foe !" 

And even if this sentiment should not al- 
ways put on its most spiritual and ideal 
form, if reputation rather than character 
and reality of life should be its aim, if it 
should occasionally resort to that barba- 
rous, revengeful, and unmeaning practice 
of dueling which has now happily become 
almost obsolete, could this be a worse evil 
than that truth and honesty should not be 
brought into greater respect than they seem 
to have now ? 

Of course, with the feeling that there must 
be a higher tone of character, in case our 
politics are to be redeemed from their deg- 
radation, must be united the removal of 
those demoralizing influences growing out 
of the war, of which we have already spok- 
en at length. When the time will come for 
this reform is still uncertain. Such is the 
want of uprightness at present in making 
pledges that we can put no full confidence, 
either in the party heretofore dominant or 
in that which expects soon to be dominant, 
that opinions or platforms or declarations of 
Congress and of law in regard to specie pay- 
ments will be respected. But a time for this 
must come, we know, first or last. When 
that time comes, and when the race diffi- 
culties shall be settled, much of our ground 
of fear for the future will be removed. The 
question then remaining, which can not be 
settled now with entire certainty, because 
we can not accurately separate temporary 
political evils from permanent ones, is no 
less a one than this, Is there such a poison 
in the political system that there is no cure 
for it ? Must the Union, made less than a 
hundred years ago, go to pieces or run into 
a degeuerate form of polity within the next 
hundred years ? The question depends upon 
the general good sense and uprightness of 
the people, whether, if evils arise that can 
be removed, they will remove them, or, if 
those evils are owing to some radical cause, 
they will be ready for a radical cure. All 



278 



THE EXPERIMENT OF THE UNION, WITH ITS PREPARATIONS. 



our future, then, hangs on the strength of 
the moral and religious causes at work or 
that can be used for the elevation of the 
American character. And in the prospect 
there is, aside from religious faith and hope, 
the consoling thought that the great mass of 
the people is not corrupt ; so that, as a good 
constitution of body resists and overcomes 
disease, so a sound general character of the 
nation may contain in itself a self-reforming 
power. No one, we think, ought to doubt 
that there is a latent force that can resist 
political evils and preserve the system who 
thinks what was endured in the late war, 
and with what readiness the people bore 
their burdens. \We are more afraid of the 



centres of wealth than we are of the scat- 
tered country population, of the temptation 
to be rich than of the middle and poorer 
class, of the half-cultivated and self-indul- 
gent than of those whose advantages for 
education have been small, of morals im- 
ported from Europe than of emigrants from 
Europe. Dangers we have of our own, to- 
gether with some of those that stand in 
the path of older communities, and seem to 
threaten the very existence of modern so- 
ciety. But we have hopes, too, of our own 
which the rest of the world does not share. 
God grant that these hopes may not be 
mere visions, and that no new darkness 
may cloud our future ! 



X. 



EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS. 



THE conception of a community so gen- 
erally educated that each one of its 
members should know and fulfill all the du- 
ties of a good citizen, should obey the laws 
without constraint, and practice humanity, 
honesty, and propriety, should be trained to 
virtue, and cultivate self-control, is one that 
has suggested itself to most eminent legis- 
lators from the dawn of history, and is, in- 
deed, so engaging a notion as to commend 
itself to every intelligent mind. The igno- 
rant must be governed by rude violence ; the 
cultivated rule themselves ; and the fertile 
fancies of the Greek thinkers were early 
filled with projects for enforcing a univers- 
al education. None of them, however, suc- 
ceeded except perhaps the Spartan legisla- 
tor. 1 The idea made no strong impression 
upon the Romans. It was adopted by the 
Israelites and the early Christians, and was 
almost perfected in China. The Arabian 
caliphs founded a school in every village. 2 
Charlemagne and Alfred strove to teach the 
savage Germans and Saxons. The Papal 
Church of the Middle Ages taught in its 
monasteries ; and the private schools of Eri- 
gena, Gerbert, Abelard, Duns Scotus, and a 
series of early school-masters saved educa- 
tion from sinking into monastic dullness. 
But the true parent of the modern system 
of teaching was the Reformation. Luther 
urged upon Germany the necessity of gen- 
eral instruction, 3 Calvin filled his followers 
with mental activity, and it was in the 
Protestant states of Germany that the gov- 



' Plutarch, Numa, asserts that "the fair fabric of 
justice" raised by Numa passed away rapidly because 
it was not founded upon education. Education was 
the leading principle of the institutions of Zaleucus 
and Pythagoras. Plato in the Republic, Aristotle in 
his Politics, enforce the same conception. 

2 Renan, Averroes, chap, i., describes the flourish- 
ing literary condition of Spain under the Arabs. And 
Charlemagne perhaps emulated the free schools of 
Haroun-al-Raschid. See Bginhard, Vita Caroli Imp., 
c. 33. 

3 Luther said if he were not. a preacher, he would be 
a teacher; and he thought the latter the more impor- 
tant office, since, he lamented, it was easier to form a 
new character than to correct one already depraved. 



ernments first assumed the task of educating 
all the people, and of fulfilling that concep- 
tion of the duty of legislators which had 
dawned upon the active intellects of Greece. 
The government became the school-master, 
the nation a community of pupils. Prussia, 
Saxony, and several of the lesser states have 
carried on the theory to a wide limit. No 
one is suffered in Prussia to go without an 
education. In many districts it is impossi- 
ble to find a person who can not read and 
write. Yet it must be remembei'ed that it 
is only since the beginning of the present 
century that Prussia has made its chief ad- 
vance in education ; that it was after the 
disasters and the shame of the Napoleonic 
invasion that the king, the queen Louisa, 
and the minister Stein renewed the public 
schools, emulated the zeal of Pestalozzi and 
Zeller, aud forged that intellectual weapon 
which was to cleave the armor of their tri- 
umphant foes, for it is allowed that the 
common schools and their teachers have 
chiefly produced the unity and progress of 
the German race. 

The idea of popular instruction was 
brought to the New World by our ances- 
tors in the seventeenth century, and has 
here found its most appropriate home. Pu- 
ritan, Hollander, Huguenots, and Scots or 
Scottish - Irish, they had seen that most 
of their stiff erings and persecutions had 
sprung from ignorance and blind fanati- 
cism. They had become in Europe the 
most intellectual and studious of its peo- 
ple, and, amidst the bleak forests of New 
England and the middle colonies, planted 
almost at their first landing the printing- 
press and the school. Knowledge they 
thought the proper cure for social evils. 
It was the school-master and the school- 
house, they believed, that could alone save 
them from sinking into barbarism, and re- 
vive a more than Attic refinement in the 
dismal wilderness. Massachusetts and Con- 
necticut early passed laws that might seem 
severe even to our present conception of the 
duties and powers of the State. Every 



280 



EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS. 



father of a family was obliged under a 
considerable penalty to see that his chil- 
dren were taught to read and write, and 
were instructed in the elements of morals 
and religion. The provision was apparent- 
ly enforced, and it is possible that the peo- 
ple of New England in the seventeenth cen- 
tury were better educated 1 ban those of any 
European nation. In the present century 
Germany has outstripped Massachusetts. 
But the honorable race is still to be run, 
and it may be hoped that the next and all 
succeeding centuries will witness a gener- 
ous strife among the nations which can do 
most to cultivate the popular intellect. As 
school-masters alone can legislators hope 
to be successful. Mental equality is the 
foundation of popular sovereignty, and we 
must conclude with the Greek philosopher 
that no political institutions can be made 
lasting without the cement of a common 
education. 

In the American plan of education the 
national government has no further share 
than to give liberally from its public domain 
to the State or Territorial schools, and by 
its Educational Department at Washington 
to collect and distribute important informa- 
tion. 1 Each State controls its schools in its 
own way, directs the course of education 
and the formation of the school-districts, 
sometimes prescribes what is to be taught, 
provides the way in which the school funds 
are to be raised, and governs by general 
laws. The local municipalities levy the 
school taxes and elect the school officers. 
These officers appoint the teachers and fix 
their salaries, build school -houses, govern 
and support the schools. Thus the people 
of each school - district choose their own 
school officers, and the schools are wholly 
under popular rule — the true source of their 
rapid growth and general excellence. 

In no part of the Union has education 
been so carefully and assiduously cultivated 
as in New England, and nowhere have its 
results been so important and remarkable. 
Wealth, industry, and good order have fol- 
lowed in its train. Massachusetts, although 



1 Theory of Education, Washington, 1S74, p. 10, 
etc. The generosity of the general government to the 
puhlic schools has never wavered, and but for its fore- 
sight and liberality they could never have spread so 
rapidly over the new Territories. 



its soil is sterile and its climate severe, main- 
tains a larger population in proportion to 
its territory than any other State. All New 
England is prosperous beyond example ; and 
it has ever been the custom of its chief 
statesmen to attribute this rapid progress 
and general activity to the common schools. 
Of the early New England teachers Ezekiel 
Cheever, almost in the dawn of its history, 
holds a conspicuous place. Cotton Mather 
compliments him as the civilizer of his coun- 
try. He was a scholar, learned, accurate, 
judicious; a severe and unsparing master, 
tall, dignified, and stern. He taught in the 
middle of the seventeenth century in Con- 
necticut, and was afterward transferred to 
Boston, where he died at ninety-four. He 
was the founder of schools, and three gen- 
erations of intelligent men were formed by 
his careful hand. He gave the Latin school 
at Boston its early excellence, and his ardent 
labors as a school-master for seventy years 
justify Cotton Matber's unstinted praise. 
"Educated brain," we are told, "is the only 
commodity in which Massachusetts can com- 
pete with other States," and to its long line 
of eminent school -masters New England 
owes its wealth and progress. Yet it has 
only been by a slow and often doubtful toil 
that in its natural home American education 
has attained its final excellence. The wild 
new laud before the Revolution was incapa- 
ble of reaching more than the elements of 
knowledge. When it became free, its emi- 
nent men were all the firmest friends of ed- 
ucation. The two Adamses and their asso- 
ciates in all the New England States felt 
that their labors in the cause of freedom 
were incomplete, and even useless, unless 
they could teach all the people the duties 
of good citizens. But even in Massachusetts 
until 1834 the common schools had been 
comparatively neglected, their means of 
support were insufficient, the teachers were 
often incompetent, the school -houses rude 
and inconvenient. But in New England the 
principle had always been admitted that it 
was the duty of the State to educate its 
children, and in 1834 a fund of $1,000,000 was 
raised in Massachusetts to aid the towns in 
their educational labors. From that time a 
steady progress has been observed not only 
in Massachusetts, but through all New En- 
gland. Gifted and laborious educators have 



NEW ENGLAND AND NEW YORK. 



281 



given their lives to the perfection of the 
common - school system. Mann, Barnard, 
and their ahle coadjutors have raised the 
New England States to a high rank among 
the communities that teach the people. A 
normal school was opened in 1839 at Lex- 
iugton ; Massachusetts has now sis. Con- 
necticut and Ehode Island have made equal 
progress. Yet it was only a few years ago 
that Connecticut still demanded rates, and 
that the school-houses of Rhode Island were 
still imperfect. 1 In some districts of New 
England poverty and the thinness of the 
population prevent the perfection of the 
system. In Madawaska, Maine, where the 
currency is in articles of trade, and the brief 
summer scarcely supplies the people with 
necessary food, they are aided by the gener- 
osity of their fellow-citizens and are wholly 
exempted from school taxes. 

Massachusetts expends more money upon 
its schools than any other State in propor- 
tion to its population. Its teachers are bet- 
ter paid, its school buildings generally more 
complete, and its people more carefully in- 
structed. Of 292,481 persons in the State 
between the ages of five and fifteen in 
1873, the average attendance at school was 
210,248, or more than seventy per cent. 2 
The rate of attendance constantly increases, 
new schools are founded every year, new 
buildings provided, and the normal schools 
and colleges send out annually a succession 
of well-trained teachers. The whole popu- 
lation of Massachusetts is probably a mill- 
ion and a half. They laid out last year in 
the various expenses of the public schools 
$6,180,848 64, or about twenty-one dollars 
for each person of school age. A cheaper 
mode of education could in no way be de- 
vised. In private schools the cost of in- 
structing as many children would be four 
or five fold, and the public schools of Mas- 
sachusetts are already better than any pri- 
vate schools, or are rapidly becoming so. 
But even in Massachusetts a rigid compul- 
sory law is plainly necessary. Its unedu- 
cated population give rise to three-fourths 
of its crime, and an inilux of foreigners has 



1 The fine engravings of new school huildings that 
adorn the latest educational report from Connecticut 
are worthy of general study. In fact, all the educa- 
tional reports of the various States are full of interest. 

2 Secretary's Report, 1ST3-74, p. 113. 



already filled it with a dangerous, because 
uncultivated, class. Connecticut, which 
has recently set in action its compulsory 
law, is probably in advance of any other 
State in the rate of attendance. 1 It has 
long been a centre of manufactures and of 
inventive progress. Its wealth and influ- 
ence increase rapidly, and its capitalists 
have discovered that the public school is 
the sure path to good morals and order 
among those who labor. Hence they en- 
courage education, and press on the im- 
provement of all the instruments of pub- 
lic teaching. 

In New York the growth of the common- 
school system has been slow, and its advan- 
tages only reluctantly admitted. I shall re- 
view its progress briefly, since in no State 
has the struggle for victory been more la- 
borious or the triumph of the friends of 
knowledge more complete. 2 There was 
always a desire for education prevalent 
among its people, even when they were 
no more than a band of trappers and 
traders, and an accomplished school-mas- 
ter was one of the earliest importations 
from the shores of Holland. The free 
school still exists, founded by the Reform- 
ed Dutch Church, in the city of New York, 
not long after Boston had been planted on 
its three mountains. The Dutch clergy- 
man usually kept a school, and the Dutch 
immigrants were probably not altogether 
illiterate. But in the opening of the sev- 
enteenth century the idea of a common ed- 
ucation for all the people was still a phan- 
tasm and a Utopian vision ; it was scarcely 
thought possible, or even desirable, to teach 
the laboring classes or to raise a whole na- 
tion to an equality of knowledge. Through 
the colonial period, and for a long time aft- 
ter the Revolution, the people of New York 
possessed no means of education except a 
village school and an incompetent teach- 



1 Connecticut attributes its inventive genius to the 
public schools established by its "fathers." See Re- 
port of the Commissioner of Education (Eaton), 1872, 
p. 47, and Connecticut Report of Board of Education, 
1874. Of the effect of the compulsory law, says one 
school visitor, " In one of the largest villages I found 
the increase" (in attendance) "was sixty-seven per 
cent." 

2 Randall, Hist. Common Schools of New York. 
Boese, Hist. School System of the City of New York. 
New York State Reports. New York City Reports. 



282 



EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS. 



er, a college and a few classical seminaries, 
and its chief political leaders, as the State 
increased rapidly in wealth and population 
from 1787 to the close of the century, felt 
the pressing want of some method of gen- 
eral instruction. 
/ George Clinton, Governor of New York in 
1795, suggested and laid the foundation of 
its common schools. He was one of those 
discreet and rational intellects that had 
sustained his country through the Revo- 
lution with unchanging firmness, and had 
learned amidst its perils the value of men- 
tal progress. Like Washington, Jefferson, 
or Adams, he had discovered that an igno- 
rant people could not he a free one ; that 
the education of the wealthy class alone 
was fatal to human equality; and in his 
message to the Legislature of 1795, Clinton 
recommended to the people " the establish- 
ment of common schools throughout the 
State." It was a period when such a sug- 
gestion was so new and so surprising as to 
have little chance of general approval, aud 
the conception of a State expending its 
revenues in teaching was scarcely heard 
of out of Saxony and Prussia. New En- 
gland had in part developed the idea, hut 
to the people of New York it was altogether 
novel. The State was poor, and still in its 
feeble infancy; the savages still occupied a 
large part of its domain west of Albany ; its 
chief city was yet a small though rapidly 
advancing town ; no great canal had joined 
the Hudson to the lakes, and the wealth of 
a continent had not yet found its natural 
outlet to the sea. But Clinton's suggestion 
was at once adopted by the intelligent Leg- 
islature, and a sum of $50,000 was set aside 
to be divided among the towns and coun- 
ties in proportion to the number of their 
electors, and each county was required to 
raise by taxation a sum of money from ev- 
ery town equal to one-half the amount al- 
lowed by the State. Such was the founda- 
tion of the common-school system, and for 
a time it flourished with singular success. 
In 1798, in sixteen of the twenty -three 
counties, 1352 schools were already opened, 
and 59,660 children had received in them at 
least some share of the public tuition. But 
the limit of the appropriation expired in 
1800, the schools were suffered to languish, 
and the system was practically abandoned. 



Soon, however, two remarkable men took 
up the cause of education, and forced it 
upon the attention of the people. Jede 
diah Peck, of Otsego, a native of Connecti- 
cut, and Adam Comstock, of Saratoga, de- 
serve to be remembered among the chief 
benefactors of New York. Peck was a 
plain uneducated farmer, a religious en- 
thusiast, who exhorted and prayed with 
the families he visited ; was modest, meek, 
diminutive in size, and almost repulsive in 
appearance; yet his active labors in the 
cause of knowledge show that he had not 
only cultivated himself, but was incessant- 
ly teaching others. Comstock, not more 
highly educated, aided him with equal 
zeal. They asserted every where that free- 
dom, morality, and religion could only be 
supported by general intelligence. They 
pressed their theme upon the Legislature 
and the people. Peck was anxious that a 
school fund should be provided, like that 
of his native State, Connecticut, and he 
found a ready ally in Governor Clinton, 
who in 1802 again urged upon the Legis- 
lature the renewal of the common schools. 
But the people were no longer willing to be 
taxed for the diffusion of knowledge. Po- 
litical troubles were impending, the State 
was poor, and all that the friends of educa- 
tion could obtain was a grant of the pro- 
ceeds of certain lotteries, known as " Liter- 
ature Lotteries," or the sales of the State 
lands, and three thousand shares of the 
capital of the Merchants' Bank of the city 
of New York, to found the nucleus of the 
common-school fund. Twice Mr. Peck's bill 
to authorize the towns to tax themselves 
for school purposes failed in the Legisla- 
ture. But a strong impulse toward gener- 
al education had now been awakened in 
England by the success of the Lancaste- 
rian system : the Dissenters, and chiefly 
the Methodists, had lent their influence to 
a new effort to teach the poorer classes, and 
the movement was already felt in the New 
World. [The city of New York in 1805 
founded its free -school society, and the 
Mayor, De Witt Clinton, with many other 
patriotic citizens, gave his aid to the cause 
of the popular education with valuable as- 
siduity!""] The Lancasterian system was in- 
troduced, and the free schools made consid- 
erable progress. De Witt Clinton, whose 



ESTABLISHMENT OF THE COMMON-SCHOOL SYSTEM IN NEW YORK. 283 



sincere zeal for science, art, literature, and 
freedom lias affected the prosperity of his 
native State more, perhaps, than any other 
cause, and who lived to prepare and per- 
fect a great engineering work, which for 
that early period seems almost incredible, 
must also be ranked among the most emi- 
nent of the friends of the common schools. 
He was never weary of urging forward 
mental progress, and filling the minds of 
his contemporaries with the conception of 
a complete form of national education. 

Peck, Comstock, and Clinton at last, aft- 
er a brave contest against ignorance, were 
successful, and in 1812 a bill passed the 
Legislature of New York founding anew a 
common-school system that was to remain 
in action until 1842. A sum was given to 
every town for school purposes. The town 
was obliged to raise an equal amount by 
taxation. No district was to be left with- 
out its school-house, and no village without 
its teacher. The commissioners recom- 
mended the plan to the people by point- 
ing to the necessary connection between 
knowledge and virtue, and by invoking the 
sacred name and authority of Washington. 
It was, in fact, in a period of singular gloom 
and public danger that the machinery of 
public education was first set in motion in 
New York. A barbarous war was raging 
on the frontier and over the seas ; English 
cruisers swept the commerce of the republic 
from the ocean, and American privateers re- 
taliated with more than common success. 
Poverty once more pressed upon the people. 
Yet in periods of public danger men see 
more clearly their true interests, and amidst 
the perils of war our ancestors founded the 
fairest of the fabrics of peace. Peck, Clin- 
ton, Comstock, were sustained by their fel- 
low-citizens, and in 1813 Gideon Hawley 
became the superintendent of the common 
schools of New York. He was a young law- 
yer, active, intelligent, and cultivated in 
letters ; and for eight years his energy and 
zeal kept alive the onward progress of edu- 
cation. Peace had returned ; the vast re- 
sources of the State were slowly developed ; 
the savages were removed from the interior 
counties ; the famous wheat fields of the 
Mohawk and the Genesee rose into won- 
derful productiveness ; a vast system of 
internal improvements was projected by 



Clinton that was to prove the source of 
boundless progress to the nation as well as 
the State. Yet the labors of the friends of 
education will probably outlive the mate- 
rial achievements of this busy period. And 
it is as educators that HaAvley, Peck, and 
Clinton may be remembered in distant ages 
as the founders of the prosperity of New 
York. 

The common schools advanced in general 
favor amidst much opposition. Hawley's 
vigorous hand kept them from falling into 
decay, as they had fallen in 1800. In 1819 
there were already nearly 6000 school-dis- 
tricts, and it was estimated that almost 
250,000 children had been placed upon their 
lists. In 1820, of 302,703 children of the 
proper age, 271,877 were taught in the 
schools. The uumber was still greater in 
1821. Yet here the valuable labors of Gid- 
eon Hawley came to an end ; a political op- 
position removed him from office, a person 
of inferior talents was put in his place, and 
thus New York repaid the services of its 
great benefactor by a cruel ingratitude. 
But the immense fabric which he had 
helped to rear could not now be torn 
down, and De Witt Clinton, the Governor 
of the State, resolutely pressed on the cause 
of education. The control of the schools 
was transferred to the Secretary of State, 
Yates, an intelligent and able man. The 
number of districts in 1822 was 7051, and 
351,173, out of 357,000 children, had been 
taught during the year in the public schools. 
Joseph Lancaster visited the United States 
in 1818, and had been received by De Witt 
Clinton with signal interest, and his meth- 
od of teaching was at that time the popular 
one ; his presence at least gave new cour- 
age to the friends of knowledge, and the 
genius of Pestalozzi and the example of 
European educators were felt in New York. 
It was said that its education was even 
more general than that of Connecticut, 
which had a larger school fund, and where 
the common-school system had been longer 
in use. 

Yet the idea of a free and public educa- 
tion for all classes of the people, a common 
source for all of equality and union, had not 
yet been openly avowed, and the division 
of castes was still maintained in the public 
schools. Those children whose parents were 



284 



EDUCATIONAL PROGKESS. 



too poor to pay the rates were called charity 
scholars ; in some districts they seem not to 
have been admitted at all to the schools. 
The right of every child to a free and full 
education by the commuuity was seldom al- 
lowed. It may well be supposed, too, that 
the instruments of education were at this 
early period in its course (1822) very imper- 
fect and rude. The school-houses were oft- 
en bare log-huts in the country, or narrow 
and pestilential rooms in the cities and 
towns ; the teachers were uncultivated and 
incompetent ; the school-books worthless and 
worn ; the whole fabric of education a vast 
misshapen pile that needed the skill of a 
master-architect to found it securely. Such 
a man was De Witt Clinton. To no single 
intellect is New York so widely indebted 
for its progress, vigor, and refinement; and 
in every part of his native State some trace 
of Clinton's energy and foresight may be 
found. He had just completed the great 
canal which had tested for so many years 
his courage and endurance amidst ceaseless 
opposition and unsparing assaults; he had 
seen the waters of Lake Erie mingle with 
the Hudson ; he had been every where the 
founder of libraries, colleges, academies of 
design, and centres of art ; and now he had 
been chosen Governor by a spontaneous im- 
pulse of a grateful people. One of bis latest 
labors was to perfect the public schools. 
He urged (1826) the founding of schools for 
teachers, the extension of the course of 
study, the creation of school libraries, the 
increase of teachers' salaries, careful inspec- 
tion, the higher education of womeu. None 
of those improvements that have since been 
adopted seem to have escaped his clear 
perception ; and he founded all his projects 
upon a single principle. " I consider," he 
said, " the system of our common schools the 
palladium of our freedom." 

Not long after, Clinton died suddenly. But 
his ideas live among us, and his successors 
have seldom shown any indifference to the 
cause of popular education. The states- 
men of all parties have united in advancing 
the popular intellect. Spencer, Marcy, Dix, 
Flagg, aided in the organization of that im- 
mense scheme of public instruction which 
has ruled the fortunes of the State, and suc- 
cessfully resisted the assaults of various 
foes. Iu 1832 there were 9690 school-dis- 



tricts, and 514,475 children had been taught 
in the public schools^ Only about ten thou- 
sand of the school age seem to have lost the 
advantages of education. But in the city 
of New York the extraordinary growth of 
the foreign population now began to lead 
to a struggle that was to rise into singular 
importance.; For many years Ireland had 
poured out its excess of population upon 
New York, and the Irish immigrants had 
at first seemed willing and even eager to 
become thoroughly American and republic- 
an. They sent their children to the public 
schools, and were liberal and patriotic in 
politics. But unhappily a less discreet pol- 
icy was advocated by their priests, who 
founded a number of private schools, and 
required that they should be supported by 
a donation from the public funds. The 
Irish population do not seem to have fol- 
lowed their guidance implicitly, and have 
always profited largely from the system of 
common schools. But Bishop Hughes urged 
on the sectarian contest with unyielding 
rigor, his priests and many of his people 
followed him, and already in 1840 that vio- 
lent struggle had begun which seems fated 
to extend throughout the whole Union wher- 
ever the indiscreet counsels of the papacy 
can drive its Church into an opposition to 
the civil administration. 

The question was whether the public 
schools should be converted into a series 
of sectai'ian institutions, whether each sect 
should have its own schools, whether the 
Bible should at least be excluded from the 
public teaching, or whether the common 
schools should resemble the government un- 
der which they had grown up, and take no- 
tice of no difference of religious or secular 
opinion. In the one case they must be re- 
modeled upon the plan pursued in Europe ; 
in the other, they must remain wholly Amer- 
ican. Iu one, separate churches or sects 
would be recognized and maintained by 
our government ; and in the other, the sects 
would be held in complete obedience to the 
civil law. The question was debated with 
earnestness. A single sect alone demanded 
a change in the principle of free education, 
and even of that one many of the most in- 
telligent members were satisfied with the 
equity and liberality of the American sys- 
tem, and the common schools have retained 



SUCCESS OF THE COMMON-SCHOOL SYSTEM. 



285 



their unsectarian character in spite of the 
ceaseless and often dangerous assaults of 
their foes. Still more important advances 
were now made in the material and nature 
of public instruction. From 1842 the sys- 
tem rose rapidly to a completeness which 
had scarcely been looked for. The culti- 
vated zeal of the Hon. Horace Maun, from 
Massachusetts, lent new ideas and a fresh 
impulse to education in New York; and at 
a distinguished convention of superintend- 
ents and others, held at Utica in 1842, the 
various topics of the important theme were 
discussed with fresh animation. It was 
shown from recent statistics that crime de- 
creased with the advance of education, and 
that the more perfect the schools, the less 
costly would be the prisons and the alms- 
houses. It was shown that knowledge 
should be free to all the people, and that 
all the people should, if possible, be educa- 
ted in the same schools. The defects of the 
common schools were pointed out — their 
imperfect buildiugs, uncultivated teachers, 
worthless books. Emersou, from Massachu- 
setts, told of the value of the normal school 
which had beeu established in his own State, 
and showed that the teacher should be the 
highest and most cultivated of his con- 
temporaries. Horace Mann enlarged with 
all the eloquence of his intellect upon the 
grandeur of the work in which they were 
engaged. And from the convention of 1842 
education began to assume a more scientific 
form among us and to penetrate more deep- 
ly among the people. 

A normal school was now (1844) estab- 
lished at Albany, the first of those excellent 
institutions which have raised our public 
teachers to a high standard, and which seem 
capable of being made the source of a great 
moral advance. The aim of the normal 
school is to produce a perfect teacher, to 
soften the manners, refine the taste, and cul- 
tivate the faculties of those intrusted with 
the care of children. Time has proved their 
usefulness, and may raise them to a still 
higher excellence. It is not impossible that 
our normal schools may at last educate our 
professors, and produce our most active men 
of letters. District libraries began now to 
be improved and widely extended, teachers' 
institutes were formed, the fabric of educa- 
tion was enlarged and amended; but the 



system was still in its infancy, and the prin- 
ciple of a common education provided by the 
state, and possibly enforced by it, had not yet 
become familiar to the people. The school- 
houses were still, in many districts, painful- 
ly rude ; of 7000 only 2000 had more than 
one apartment, and in some counties they 
were wholly unfit for scholastic purposes. 
Instead of beiug the finest and most impos- 
ing building in every town and village, the 
school-house was often one of the rudest 
and least convenient. In many counties 
the school rates were still exacted, and par- 
ents refused to send their children to schools 
where they were looked down upon by their 
wealthier neighbors. The principle of free 
education had not yet been admitted in New 
York ; and when the friends of education 
pressed upon the State Convention of 1845 
the duty of the Legislature to provide for 
the instruction of the community by a gen- 
eral taxation, the motion was defeated, and 
the system of charity schools was maintain- 
ed for another twenty years. It was not 
until the rebellion and the disasters of the 
civil war had forced men to see more clearly 
their own interests that an efficient and 
universal system of common schools was 
extended over the State. 

For fifty years the idea of public educa- 
tion had been slowly unfolding itself in New 
York. The finest intellects of the State had 
been employed upon its development ; from 
Peck and Clinton to Dix, Spencer, Seward, 
Young, Flagg, Greeley, Morgan, an endless 
array of accomplished citizens had joined in 
the school conventions, and lent aid to the 
growth of the intellect. Already in 1845 
the Hon. Horace Mann could say, " The great 
State of New York, by means of her county 
superintendents, State Normal School, and 
otherwise, is carrying forward the work of 
public education more rapidly than any oth- 
er State in the Union or auy other country 
in the world." And the Hon. Henry Bar- 
nard, of Connecticut, thought its system su- 
perior iu many particulars to any other he 
knew of. But the county superintendents 
were abolished in 1847, and the common 
schools began at once to decline. Their 
enemies were active, and a violent struggle 
arose upon the question of free education. 
A free -school act was passed in 1849, yet 
still clogged by rate bills and assessments. 



286 



EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS. 



In many instances in the country wealthy 
property owners refused to be taxed for ed- 
ucation. The free schools were assailed with 
new energy by their opponents, and the Ro- 
man Catholic editors demanded the repeal 
of the free-school law. They required the 
schools "to be subject to the clergy;" oth- 
erwise, said their leading paper, they will 
be " a source of demoralization and public 
nuisances." A large party joined the oppo- 
sition to the schools. But the people rose 
in their defense. Fish, Hunt, Phelps, Wool, 
Nott, Greeley, and a throng of able men led 
the party of education. The elections of 
1850 decided the question in their favor, 
and in 1851 the principle that the State 
must educate all its children was sanction- 
ed in theory by the popular vote. 

Meantime — for I must pass rapidly over 
the history of this great struggle of the in- 
tellect — within the next ten years the 
school - houses grew into convenient and 
costly buildings, supplied with all the re- 
quirements of careful tuition. The normal 
school gave out a succession of intelligent 
teachers. In 1861 there were 11,400 school- 
districts and 872,854 pupils ; but it was no- 
ticed that the school libraries were neglect- 
ed, and the books often wasted and destroy- 
ed. One normal school was not sufficient to 
supply with teachers ten thousand schools, 
and the odious rates were still exacted. The 
war came, and the graduates of the common 
schools were found among the foremost de- 
fenders of the Union ; and amidst the ter- 
rors of a civil convulsion, roused by heroic 
ideas, the people of the State in 1862 threw 
off forever all the lingering prejudices of the 
past, and declared education free to all as the 
light of heaven. The common-school idea 
was adopted in all its limitless expansion, 
and the State proclaimed itself the mental 
parent of all its children. The people ad- 
mitted that they had no higher duty than 
to see that no one should live among them 
without an education ; but it was some time 
before they could learn that ignorance was 
a crime against society. From the declara- 
tion of the principle of universal public in- 
struction the schools of New York have flour- 
ished in the midst of a thousand foes. The 
great influx of uneducated foreigners has 
exposed them to a mass of hostile voters. 
They have been assailed by secular and cler- 



ical influences, and have sometimes suffered 
from indifference and neglect. But the aboli- 
tion of the rates and the improvement of the 
system have drawn in a growing throng of 
pupils, and already in 1869, 1,161,155 children 
had been taught in the normal schools, acad- 
emies, colleges, and private schools of the 
State, and, what was somewhat dishearten- 
ing to the friends of education, 300,000 be- 
tween the ages of five and twenty-one had 
attended no school at all. An ominous cloud 
of ignorance had gathered under the very 
shadow of the common schools. 

A compulsory law, passed by the Legisla- 
ture of 1874, has completed, at least in the- 
ory, the public-school system of New York; 
and it is probable that succeeding genera- 
tions will see nearly all their children gath- 
ered in the school-house and the academy. 
Nor does any where a more effective and 
imposing machinery for general education 
exist, nor does any community expeud its 
money more bountifully upon the elevation 
of the popular intellect. New York gives 
$11,000,000 annually to public instruction. 
A free college in the city of New York is 
filled with the best students of the public 
schools. A fine normal school for female 
teachers adorns the metropolis ; and in ev- 
ery part of the State the normal colleges 
produce every year a great number of ac- 
complished instructors. The school-houses 
in the cities are often palaces of education, 
filled with the latest improvements in the art 
of teaching. The teachers' salaries are slow- 
ly advancing ; the reputation of the profes- 
sion rises with the higher cultivation of its 
members. Yet it must still be allowed that 
some errors have crept into the system, and 
possibly the whole theory of education may 
yet be in its infancy. The school-houses in 
the country districts are too often imper- 
fect, unadorned, and rude. They should al- 
ways be centres of taste, comfort, and con- 
venience. In the city schools too many 
branches of knowledge are taught at once. 
It would be wiser to perfect each scholar in 
the simpler elements. If religion can not 
be taught in the schools, the moral nature 
should be especially instructed, and no pupil 
should leave the public care without having 
acquired the conception of kindness, gentle- 
ness, modesty, as well as mental power. In 
this the example of the teacher is the chief 



EDUCATION IN THE SOUTH. 



287 



guide, and the highest literary culture and 
the purest characters should alone he suf- 
fered to form the dispositions of the youug. 
Eepuhlican simplicity should he inculcated 
from the cradle— a contempt for European 
follies and the glitter and display of for- 
eign barbarism. It may he hoped, too, that, 
through special schools, trades, industry, 
and all branches of labor will form at last 
a part of the education of every American. 

Pennsylvania, like New York, has passed 
through a long struggle to reach its present 
educational advantages. It has also adopt- 
ed the common-school system in its widest 
limit. 1 Its school property is of great value ; 
it expends more than $8,000,000 annually 
upon its schools ; it has no general school 
fund, and derives all its school moneys from 
taxation. It has seven State normal schools 
and a great number of excellent technical 
schools and private colleges. This wonder- 
ful community, enriched by the boundless 
gifts of nature, is also one of the most wide- 
ly educated. The spirit of Franklin has 
ever filled it with mental activity. New 
Jersey is already emulating Pennsylvania 
and New York. Its common schools are 
fast rising in excellence. The four Middle 
States (for even Delaware has shown marks 
of progress) have already joined in a gener- 
ous enthusiasm for knowledge. 

But if we turn to the Southern portion 
of the Union, the prospect is less encoura- 
ging. It is not that the first settlers of the 
South were less intelligent or cultivated 
than those of the North. Some of them 
were Huguenots, learned, thoughtful, heroic 
in their devotion to their faith ; some were 
Scottish- Irish; some Quakers, or Friends. 
The most intellectual races of Europe were 
represented on our Southern coasts. And 
after the Ke volution, Washington, Jefferson, 
Henry, Lowndes, Gadsden, and Eutledge 
would have held it their noblest mission to 
spread knowledge among the people. But 
slavery intervened. The great designs of 
Jefferson and Gadsden were never to be per- 
fected. With slavery a notion grew up that 
knowledge was only the privilege of the 
ruling class, and that tradesmen, mechanics, 

1 Pennsylvania Report, 1873, p. 12. Only one dis- 
trict, a small one, was without its common schools in a 
population of 4,000,000. Pennsylvania has adopted the 
system of free education in its widest extent. 



and slaves were better left in ignorance. 
While the Northern States seized upon the 
mighty engine of education to win ease and 
industrial progress, the Southern States suf- 
fered their free schools to perish, and even 
for their higher education looked to the 
North or to Europe. The rebellion threw 
open the South to a new intellectual move- 
ment ; a system of common schools has been 
introduced into every Southern State ; the 
colored aud even the white laborers of the 
South are said to be anxious to make use of 
this opportunity to raise themselves by an 
intelligent education to the condition of 
men. Yet we are told by the report of the 
Commissioner of Education that the com- 
mon schools are not favored by an influen- 
tial class of the people. They seem to lan- 
guish in most of the Southern States.M The 
condition of the Southern people is one of 
extreme ignorance. Of the 5,643,534 persons 
in the Union wholly "illiterate," 4,117,589 
are found in the Southern States. Of course 
these " illiterates" are nearly all native born. 
The subject is one that may well employ 
all the intelligence and observation of the 
South, for it is education alone that can give 
good order and prosperity to its people. 
Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky are al- 
ready laboring to provide a general and ef- 
fective system of instruction. It is certain 
that the extension of common schools over 
the whole South and a general education 
of its people would double the value of its 
lauds, and foster more than any thing else 
foreign immigration. 

But if the common-school system has been 
forced to make its way slowly against the 
opposition of caste and sectarianism in the 
North and East, and was nearly banished 
from the South by the long prevalence of 
slavery, in the new States and Territories 
of the West and the Pacific coast it has 
won an almost immediate popularity. 2 Here 
among the settlers of the wilderness its 
value was at once perceived. The school- 

1 So in Georgia they were closed in 1872. Report of 
the Commissioner of Education (Eaton), 1873, p. 69. 
And in Texas in 1S73 they were "abolished," and have 
scarcely been re-established. 

2 Yet even in the Western States the labors of a 
series of patriotic men alone have saved the common 
school and university funds, and made education free. 
See Tenbrook, American State Universities, p. 141, and 
p. 118-120. 



288 



EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS. 



house, the church, the newspaper, tele- 
graph, aud railway have grown up togeth- 
er. Nowhere has the American plan of 
education been found so perfectly suited to 
the wants of a progressive people. No- 
where were ever such vast and complete 
educational systems so rapidly perfected 
as in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, or 
in the newer States of the northwest. 
Through all this wide, populous, and pro- 
ductive territory, the granary of half the 
world, caste and sectarianism have been 
laid aside forever; by a spontaneous move- 
ment of the people education has been made 
free to all; such great sums are lavished 
upon the teachers and their schools as nat- 
urally startle our European contemporaries, 
and the money of the people, which in Eu- 
rope has been expended usually upon priests 
and kings, has here been devoted to the cul- 
tivation of those who earned it. Ohio spends 
nearly ten millions of dollars annually upon 
its public schools, Indiana and Illinois to- 
gether a sum not much less. The fair, con- 
venient, primary school house shines out 
upon the prairie and in the forest ; the 
higher school houses of Chicago or Cincin- 
nati are unsurpassed in New York or Bos- 
ton ; the science of teaching is carefully 
studied in a host of teachers' institutes, 
and with republican liberality the West 
and the great Northwest care for all their 
children. 1 This remarkable enthusiasm for 
education penetrates all the nation ; it has 
become the distinguishing principle of 
American progress. 2 In the heart of the 
Rocky Mountains, and in the midst of the 
gold and silver bearing peaks of Arizona 
and Colorado, the free school is the sentinel 
of civilization. In Tucson or Denver the 
love of knowledge has survived the preva- 
lence of what is usually thought the stron- 
ger passion, and the cities of the miners are 
seldom without their public school. The 
most splendid of our high school buildings 
is said to be that of Omaha, seated on a lofty 
bluff over the Missouri. California has pro- 
duced a system of education so complete 
and valuable as may well serve as a model 
for all older communities; its teachers are 

1 In all these States a sectarian party exists, but the 
majority favor free education. 

2 See Ed. Report, 1873. Minnesota and Iowa are 
filled with the educational spirit. 



made examples of propriety and tenderness, 
its scholars are taught integrity and moral 
excellence ; sectarianism and caste ave for- 
bidden to divide the people, and the pros- 
perous State is already feeling in all its 
industrial pursuits the happy influence of 
the common school. 

Thus the American system of education 
pervades and covers every section of the 
Union. By the spontaneous impulse of the 
people it has been made the foundation of 
our political institutions. It has grown up 
with little direction from the general gov- 
ernment. It has flourished in the cities 
and in the wilderness ; it spreads its golden 
links from ocean to ocean, and holds in its 
embrace the destinies of the republic. A 
few statistics will show how immense is its 
influence and how important its results. 
By the census of 1870 it appears that an 
army of nearly 200,000 teachers conduct the 
public schools of the Union ; of these, 109,000 
are females. The number of schools was 
125,000, and has no doubt largely increased. 
Fifty-eight millions of dollars 1 were raised 
in 1870 by taxation to educate the people — 
a sum nearly as great as the annual cost of 
a European army. There are also endow- 
ments and other sources of revenue, making 
the whole amount spent upon the common 
schools $64,000,000. The number of pupils 
in 1870 was more than 6,000,000. Thus the 
annual cost of each scholar enrolled was 
apparently only about ten dollars. Many of 
these pupils have attended only for a few 
months at the schools, others have been ir- 
regular and inattentive. Yet the fact that 
6,000,000 children were brought under the 
control of the common-school system in one 
year, and learned some, at least, of the pro- 
prieties of life, is sufficient to show its im- 
mense influence upon the young ; and it 
may be estimated that at least half the 
number were thoroughly instructed in the 
common branches of knowledge. 

When we look over the returns of our il- 
literate population, of the great mass of ig- 
norance that has grown up at the side of the 
common schools, we might at first conclude 
that our popular system of education had 

1 These figures must now (1875) be largely increased, 
and it is probable that 170,000,000 yearly are raised for 
school purposes by taxation alone, and the number ed- 
ucated has risen in proportion. 



EDUCATION AND CRIME. 



289 



wholly failed. Few civilized countries pre- 
sent a more lamentable scene of intense 
and almost savage dullness. Our illiterate 
population over ten years of age numbers 
5,600,000. And an unfriendly critic, the 
London Quarterly Review, April, 1875, seizes 
upon this singular contrast as a ground of 
attack upon the American system of teach- 
ing. Yet the assault fails wholly. The 
great mass of our illiterates are in the for- 
mer slave territory, where the common 
schools were never suffered to come, and 
where a large part of the people were for- 
bidden by law to learn even to read and 
write. Slavery has produced more than 
4,000,000 of our illiterates. 1 Of the re- 
mainder, who live in the Northern and West- 
ern sections of the Union, one-half are due 
to the neglect of England to educate its 
poorer classes. Our German immigrants 
are nearly all well educated. The English 
and Irish can seldom read or write. Of the 
1,300,000 illiterates in the Northern States, 
665,000 are foreign born, and they come 
chiefly from Great Britain. Thus, excluding 
the former slave territory, we have only 
690,000 native-born illiterates, and of these 
a large number are the children, no doubt, 
of foreign parents. If we allow 500,000 as 
the number of native-born Americans who 
have escaped the influence of the common 
schools, we shall not possibly fail in liberal- 
ity. The people of the Free States number 
at least 26,000,000. Only one person out of 
fifty, therefore, among us has been untouch- 
ed by the influence of the public school. 
Reaching over the wild wastes of the new 
States and the thick crowds of our cities, 
the common-school system, often imperfect 
and rude, has been almost as thorough and 
effective as the older systems of Germany 
and Holland. 

Wherever it extends, crime diminishes, 
the morals of the community improve, and 
taste and culture flourish even in the wil- 
derness. An absurd charge is sometimes 
raised against the public schools that they 
are "godless and immoral." Some recent 
statistics taken in Massachusetts show that 
eighty per cent, of its crime is committed 

1 Compendium of the Ninth Census, p. 456, and Re- 
port of the Commissioner of Education (Eaton), 1872. 
In 18T0, of 28,238,941 persons of age to read and write, 
more than one-fifth were illiterate. 
19 



by persons who have had no education, or a 
very imperfect one, that a still larger pro- 
portion have learned no trade, and that not 
far from seventy-five per cent, of its crim- 
inals are of foreign birth ;' intemperance, 
the natural resource of ignorance, is the 
parent of the greater part of this crime, and 
ninety-five per cent, of it is hereditary, 
transmitted from depraved and unculti- 
vated homes. A similar condition of things 
exists in New York and the Western States. 
If all the children of the community could 
be well educated and taught productive 
trades, crime would be diminished by more 
than one-half; and so effective already 
have been our common schools that they 
have reduced the criminal class among the 
native population to a small figure, and se- 
cured the peace of society.. The reports 
show that uneducated foreigners produce 
three-fourths of the crime and pauperism 
of our large cities. It is plain that the 
money expended upon the public schools is 
not laid out in vain. The seventy millions 
we give annually to education is the wisest 
outlay a nation ever entered upon. 

The influence of the common schools 
penetrates through all our social system, 
teaches equality and republican principles, 
offers the elements of commercial knowl- 
edge, and creates the reading public. The 
press plainly lives in the rapid progress of 
the teacher. Our common schools have 
produced a throng of readers, such as was 
never known before — countless, bountiful, 
and never satisfied. The periodicals and 
newspapers printed in the United States 
very nearly equal those of all the rest of 
the educated world. In 1870 it was esti- 
mated that 7642 were published in Europe, 
Asia, and Africa, and in our own country 
5871. 2 Since that time our publications 
have increased, it is supposed, nearly to an 
equality with those of all the world besides, 
and our forty millions of people read as much 
as all the rest of the hundreds of millions 
upon the same globe who can read at all. 
To our free institutions much of this in- 



1 Report of the Commissioner of Education (Eaton), 
1871, p. 549. Rep., 1872, p. 589. Rep., 1873, p. 173. Of 
102,S55 criminals in England only 4297 could read 
and write well ; only 206 had had a "superior" educa- 
tion. 

2 Hudson, Journalism in America, p. 773, 774. 



290 



EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS. 



quisitive spirit is due ; but to the common- 
school system we owe the capacity of grati- 
fying our curiosity and cultivating a general 
knowledge of the condition of our fellow- 
men. It is estimated that the number of 
copies of newspapers and periodicals print- 
ed in Great Britain in 1870 was 350,000,000, 
and an equal number in France. 1 The 
census returns show that in the same year 
1,500,000,000 copies were printed in the 
United States. Our readers consume and 
pay for a periodical literature twice as 
great as that of the two populous centres 
of European civilization ; and the census 
reports show how closely the progress of a 
demand for newspapers is connected with 
the advance of the common schools. Where 
there are no public schools, there are no 
newspapers ; where the teacher leads the 
way, the press follows. In uneducated 
Georgia, for example, 2 with a population of 
nearly 1,200,000, there are only 123 newspa- 
pers and periodicals ; in Massachusetts, 
with a population of nearly 1,500,000, there 
are 280. The circulation of the newspapers 
of Georgia is 14,447,388 ; of Massachusetts, 
107,691,952. In educated Ohio the annual 
circulation was, in 1870, 93,000,000 in a pop- 
ulation of 2,662,681. In uneducated Texas, 
fivefold as large as Ohio, with a population 
of 885,000, the circulation was 5,813,432. 
Only seven copies of a newspaper are print- 
ed yearly in Texas for each inhabitant ; in 
Ohio, 35 ; in Massachusetts, 74 ; in Ala- 
bama, 9 ; in Pennsylvania, 67. The total 
numher of publications in North Carolina, 
we are told, would allow only one paper to 
each inhabitant every three months ; 3 New 
York prints 113 copies a year for each of its 
people. 

California stands next in this proportion, 
and allows eighty-two copies a year to 
each inhabitant. Its people probably con- 
sume at home more newspapers in propor- 
tion to their numbers than any part of the 
world — a proof that the emigrants to the 
Golden State have been well educated, and 
their common schools effective. It would, 
indeed, be ungenerous to pursue further this 

1 Hudson, p. 774. 

2 Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1871, p. 
561-563. See Compendium of the Ninth Census, p. 510. 

3 Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1871, p. 
559. 



contrast between the literature and intelli- 
gence of the different portions of our coun- 
try. Temporary obstacles have divided us 
in this particular. We may reasonably trust 
that the common schools will win at last 
an equal victory and control in every sec- 
tion of the Union. 

These two great intellectual agents, the 
schools and the press, indissolubly united, 
have produced the physical progress of the 
country. They have built railways, canals, 
steamers, telegraphs. Our people converse 
with each other through their newspapers, 
and hold their consultations in open day. 
Publicity has become a part of our national 
life. Like the Roman patriot who desired 
all his acts to be seen and known by his 
countrymen, we throw open all our doors 
and windows to the public. All is activity 
with us, curiosity, and vigilance. It would 
be quite impossible, indeed, to trace in a 
few pages the achievements of the common 
schools. They have extended the duration 
of human life among us, 1 checked disease, 
cultivated cleanliness, founded new States, 
planted cities, indicated the sites of future 
capitals. The publisher finds the purchas- 
ers of his books in their graduates, the mer- 
chant and manufacturer depend upon their 
silent energy, the churches are filled with 
their pupils, and the lecture-rooms gratify 
the curiosity excited in their midst. Mill- 
ions of active intellects, the offspring of the 
public schools, listen to the sweet strains 
of Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier, muse 
with Bancroft on the thrilling exploits of 
freedom, or wait to hail the new bard and 
the rising thinker, whether he comes from 
the Sierras of Nevada or the crowded cities 
of the East. 

I That the common-school system is still 
imperfect no one can doubt :'it is a vast ma- 
chine, whose various parts are capable of 
ceaseless improvements.. Truancy prevails 
to a great degree, and can only be removed 
by a general compulsory law. The teachers 
in many parts of the country are themselves 
imperfectly trained, their salaries are often 
miserably low. Men have not yet learned 



i So Haushoffer, Statistik, p. 200. Wo die Civiliza- 
tion die grossten Portschritte macht, beobachtet man 
auch die grosste Abnahme der Sterblichkeit. We want 
more careful statistics on this Lice point, as on many 
others. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION. 



291 



that it is cheaper and safer to build school- 
houses than ships aud forts, and that good 
schools are always profitable. But the idea 
is rapidly spreading, and it can not be long 
before our school-houses will be every where 
models of neatness, and our teachers at least 
as well paid as our judges or constables. 
In one direction the system is destined to 
make an extraordinary advance. The plan 
of technical and industrial instruction is 
already beginning to make great progress 
among our educators. It has long been 
found in Europe that the elements of a trade 
could be rapidly acquired in childhood. 
Germany, Austria, and Belgium have all 
their industrial schools, where manufactur- 
ing, masonry, building, carpentering, engi- 
neering, are taught practically, and where 
young men, while they study history and 
geography, may also learn a trade. 1 The 
educated artisans of Germany already sur- 
pass those of all other countries. If we wish 
to preserve our equality with the European 
workman we must turn the vast powers of 
the common schools to industrial instruc- 
tion. Already the subject has met with 
careful attention among us. Schools of sci- 
ence have long been in use, but they scarce- 
ly reach the industrial classes. In 1862 
Congress gave a liberal endowment of land 
to each State to establish these schools of 
labor. 2 New York received 990,000 acres, 
Ohio 630,000, and every State its share, pro- 
portioned to its population. Various excel- 
lent institutions have been founded. Illi- 
nois has a flourishing industrial university. 
Michigan led the way in opening these 
schools. 3 Nearly all the States have em- 
ployed the national gift in some useful man- 
ner. But the chief problem of our future 
educators will no doubt be how to make ev- 
ery common school the means of spreading 
a knowledge of the arts, and to join invari- 
ably with every education some useful pur- 
suit. There is no reason why our working 
classes should not also be our most highly 
educated classes, the most intelligent, the 

» J. W. Hoyt, Report on Education, 1870, p. 118- 
127, notices the "building schools," agricultural, com- 
mercial, etc., of the Continent. Lace-making, clock- 
making, and all the arts are taught. 

a See Report of the Commissioner of Education, 
1871, p. 425. 

3 See a careful account of the Western higher schools, 
Tenbrook, American State Universities. 



most refined. What the republic requires 
is the healthy mind in the healthy body ; 
and regular physical labor should always be 
joined with mental. To unite these condi- 
tions in our national education will no doubt 
be more than ever the aim of the teacher. 
Gymnastic sports are useful ; ridiug, leap- 
ing, rowing, are not to be neglected ;' but 
labor on the farm, in the factory, with the 
mason or the mechanic, will prove of signal 
value in producing health of mind and body, 
and the experience of foreign schools shows 
that children learn with eagerness and pleas- 
ure the elements of all industrial pursuits. 
Every child must at last be taught some 
useful trade. 

In the higher grades of education our 
system is capable of a wide improvement. 
Our method of grading the schools is every 
where imperfect. Mr. Matthew Arnold pre- 
sents an attractive picture of the organiza- 
tion of the higher schools of Prussia. 2 Step 
by step they rise from the primary schools, 
through a course of instruction suited to ev- 
ery pursuit in life, until they blend with the 
Berlin University, the most perfect, it is sup- 
posed, of all the means of intellectual im- 
provement. 3 The gymnasia, pro-gymnasia, 
real schools, and upper burgher schools af- 
ford instruction for the merchant and the 
scholar. The gymnasia prepare the stu- 
dents for the university, the real schools for 
other pursuits. In the latter the modern 
languages take the place of the ancient. 
The thoroughness of the Prussian system is 
due to the strictness of the examinations, 
the regular promotion from grade to grade, 
the necessity of a university degree to the 
acquisition of a profession : and it is certain 
that our own schools may well borrow the 
strictness of the Prussian. No one should 
be permitted to take what is called a " de- 
gree" without proper preparation. To win 
a degree should be made an object of real 
value and interest. It should be part of the 
duty of government, if it assumes the charge 
of our national education, to see that it is 

1 In London it is even proposed to teach swimming 
to the school-children. 

2 Higher Schools and Universities in Germany, p. 7. 
" I believe," he says (p. 44), " that the public schools 
are preferred in Prussia on their merits," etc. This 
feeling must also become prevalent with us. 

3 " The most distinguished and influential university 
in the world," says Mr. Hoyt. Report, p. 349. 



292 



EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS. 



■well done, to enforce thoroughness, and pro- 
vide for an adequate return for its outlay ; 
and this in Prussia is secured by a system 
of rigorous examinations. 

It is somewhat mortifying to be assured 
that, after all our generous outlay upon our 
common schools, we are still surpassed in 
some particulars by the Europeans, and that 
even our costly school buildings in Boston 
and New York are excelled by those of Ber- 
lin, Vienna, and London. 1 The village school- 
houses of Switzerland are said to be un- 
equaled in grace and simplicity. They are 
surrounded by gardens or play-grounds, and 
imbedded in flowers. In London, where 
land is cheap, a large play-ground is pro- 
vided for the children ; and several of its 
new school-houses are so convenient and 
admirable that they may instruct even our 
most successful builders. And of the for- 
eign teachers, especially those of Germany, 
we are told that they are graduates of a uni- 
versity, acquainted with the whole range of 
letters and science, and carefully instructed 
in the art of teaching ; that they have giv- 
en themselves to their profession from early 
youth with ardor, and improve each year by 
active practice. They form a dignified com- 
munity of state officials. They have usu- 
ally, at least in the higher grades, adequate 
salaries, and a pension in sickness or old 
age. In Holland the teachers have already 
become the most respectable class in the 
community; and in Prussia their value is 
allowed by a most intelligent government. 
Yet we can have no doubt that many of our 
American teachers already equal in attain- 
ments even those of Holland, and that our 
great army of instructors is rapidly improv- 
ing in discipline and skill. Our teachers 
are already often the purest and wisest part 
of our people. When their profession is 
made a safe and profitable one they will 
seldom leave it. Our best teachers already 
give their whole lives to their pursuit, and 
it is chiefly those who are badly paid who 
seek some other means of living. It must 
be the aim of our system to make the teach- 
er's employment permanent. 



i Massachusetts Report, 1873-74, p. 35. Mr. Phil- 
brick's criticism is often just, but I fear his notion of 
the happy condition of the European teacher is not 
well founded. In Prussia the primary teachers are 
badly paid. 



The tendency of American education is 
evidently to constant and valuable prog- 
ress. [Our schools and teachers are far bet- 
ter than they were ten or twenty years ago. 
Our school buildings are finer and more com- 
plete, in general, than those of any European 
nation, except, perhaps, Switzerland and a 
part of Germany. 1 Of infinite grace and va- 
riety, these palaces and cottages of educa- 
tion adorn all our land. Normal schools are 
springing up in all the States with singular 
rapidity ; practical learning is making con- 
stant advances among us. We have already 
discovered the defects of our system, and are 
laboring to amend them. But the question 
is already presented to us whether the na- 
tional government should not provide for 
the common welfare by insisting upon the 
general education of the vast mass of our 
illiterates. In the instance of the colored 
people, it seems a duty imposed upon the 
nation to educate them all ; and the im- 
mense influx of uncultivated foreigners and 
the large body of uneducated whites at the 
South demand some immediate remedy for 
a pressing danger. The safety of the gov- 
ernment requires that it should enforce and 
support every where popular instruction. 
Where a State fails to educate its people, 
the national government has plainly a right 
to interfere, and a general system of public 
instruction might be formed which would 
enforce every where thorough and practical 
teaching, uniformity in study, and mental 
equality throughout the nation. Our col- 
leges and universities must finally form a 
part of the national system, and offer a free 
education in the highest branches to every 
intelligent citizen. 

The extraordinary cheapness of the Amer- 
ican school system, 2 its effectiveness, its ad- 
mirable influence upon morals and public 
order, its equity and liberality, have been 

1 A great mass of information may be found in the 
reports of Mr. Eaton, the National Commissioner of 
Education, and the value of his bureau is already ap- 
parent. It has spread many striking facts. 

2 The elegance and convenience of such buildings 
as the Worcester High School, the Omaha palace, with 
its Mansard-roof and graceful spires, the New York 
Normal School, or the infinite series of magnificent 
school buildings reaching from ocean to ocean, would 
scarcely seem to admit of the idea of cheapness, yet 
the cost of a single Versailles or Blenheim would sur- 
pass all that we have laid out thus far on school- 
houses. 



EDUCATIONAL PROSPECTS. 



29,3 



proved in every part of the Union, and, like 
a prudent family, the nation educates its 
children in common. The chief excellence 
of our system is that it teaches pure repub- 
licanism. In private schools and colleges 
the principle of human equality upon which 
our country leans for safety is sometimes for- 
gotten. Foreign impulses, frivolities, fash- 
ions, barbarisms, may at times corrupt our 
youth, and reach even the pulpit and the 
press. But the public schools bravely re- 
pel the wave of European reaction, and are 
founded upon the immutable principles of 
1776. In the public schools Samuel and 
John Adams, Jefferson, Washington, and 
Franklin speak to us with the fresh ardor 



of the dawn of freedom, inculcate a rising 
humanity, and demand for their new repub- 
lic a plain advance over the savage blind- 
ness of the past. So long as our public 
schools nourish, the country is safe. So 
long as American ideas are taught by ac- 
complished and patriotic teachers to each 
new generation, the republic will ever 
live, f When falls the common-school sys- 
tem, freedom perishes and reason dies."! 
Possessed of this admirable instrument, we 
may teach with irresistible clearness the 
principles of 1776, and the second century 
of the republic may witness a rapid growth 
of knowledge among us unequaled among 
nations. 



XL 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



I.— THE EXACT SCIENCES. 

THE condition of the British dependen- 
cies in North America during the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries was by no 
means favorable to the growth among their 
inhabitants of a high order of intellectual 
culture, whether literary, aesthetic, or scien- 
tific. During a large portion of this pe- 
riod, the colonies were but feeble and iso- 
lated settlements dotted at wide intervals 
along a sea-coast a thousand miles in length, 
and separated from each other by vast 
stretches of unbroken forest. Even when 
in the lapse of time these natural barriers 
had been more or less completely broken 
down, and the infant communities began to 
mingle with each other along their bound- 
aries, the territory redeemed to civilization 
formed still but a narrow fringe along the 
margin of a wilderness of unknown extent, 
and its occupants continued every where, 
except in the immediate neighborhood of 
the original centres of population, to be sub- 
ject to all the hardships and privations of 
a pioneer life. To these natural disadvan- 
tages must be added the anxieties and oft- 
en serious molestations arising out of the 
immediate contact of the colonies upon their 
extended frontier with the aboriginal inhab- 
itants of the continent — tribes of savages 
with whom their relations were always pre- 
carious and often hostile ; and out of the 
wars in which Great Britain was more or 
less constantly engaged with the Continent- 
al powers which had also their outposts on 
these shores. These were strifes in which 
the colonies became embroiled in spite of 
themselves, and in which, while they had 
every thing to suffer, they had nothing 
whatever to gain. When along with these 
things we consider the absence upon this 
continent, during the entire period preceding 
our Revolutionary struggle, of all the aids 
indispensable to the prosecution of original 
research by the scholar or man of science — - 
as, for instance, libraries, archives, collec- 
tions, museums, laboratories, observatories, 
universities, and eyen living expositors of 



the knowledge already existing — it should 
surprise us not so much that in the early 
dawn of the republic our people had not yet 
won for themselves a lofty name for their 
achievements in letters or in science as that 
they should have been, as they were in fact, 
generally well educated in the rudiments 
of knowledge, so that such a thing as gross 
ignorance was hardly known among them. 

In any review of the progress of science, 
therefore, during the first century of the re- 
public, the period which lies between the 
declaration of independence and the close of 
the eighteenth century may, without dan- 
ger of any important omission, be passed 
over in silence. There were men, it is true, 
in the colonies and in the newly emanci- 
pated States whose native abilities and dis- 
tinguished attainments as astronomers or 
physicists won for them a reputation which 
in their time reached to other lands, and 
which has since come down to us; but 
these, though they were masters, were not 
originators, and their names are but inci- 
dentally connected with the history of sci- 
ence. Of this class David Rittenhouse is 
an honorable example. His scientific activ- 
ity is illustrated in his numerous communi- 
cations to the American Philosophical So- 
ciety, of which he was a member, and in the 
presidency of which he succeeded Franklin 
— communications which display not only 
a powerful but also a remarkably versatile 
mind; and his singular ingenuity and ex- 
traordinary mechanical skill are attested by 
his orreries, still to be seen in the College 
of New Jersey and the University of Pennsyl- 
vania, which, according to the account giv- 
en in the Transactions of the Philosophical 
Society, show the movements of the heav- 
enly bodies for a period of five thousand 
years, and their positions in each year, 
month, day, and hour, with such accuracy 
as not in all this time to differ sensibly from 
those given by the astronomical tables. 

Toward the close of the century the cele- 
brated Priestley, whose discoveries entitle 
him to a high place among the original in- 



ENCOURAGEMENT BY THE GOVERNMENT. 



295 



vestigators of his day, made our country his 
home ; but as the successes to which his 
fame is due were achieved before he left his 
native country, and as his later years were 
mainly occupied with the profitless task of 
defending a no w long exploded theory, which 
his own discoveries had already rendered in- 
defensible, and which his contemporaries 
were every where even then abandoning, he 
can not be counted as having materially 
contributed to the advancement of science 
in America. Another illustrious name be- 
longs to this time, which should have been 
ours, but which was lost to us by influences 
not wholly unlike those which gained us 
Priestley. Benjamin Thompson, afterward 
Count of Rumford, was an American who 
early in life abandoned a home and a coun- 
try which his fellow-citizens had made in- 
tolerable. Received into the service of a 
foreign prince, his force of character, activ- 
ity of intellect, and singularly practical 
turn of mind at once commanded apprecia- 
tion, and secured to him a position which 
enabled him to achieve a noble reputation 
not only as an efficient administrative offi- 
cer and a zealous philanthropist, but also as 
an original and sagacious scientific investi- 
gator. To Rumford belongs the immortal 
honor of having boldly announced, before 
the close of the eigbteenth century, a truth 
which the world was not very ready to re- 
ceive till near the middle of the nineteenth, 
a truth which lies at the foundation of the 
mechanical theory of heat, and through that 
theory leads to the grandest generalization 
in the history of science — the truth that 
heat is a mode of motion. Now that this 
truth has come to be universally admitted, 
America may be justly proud that its dis- 
covery was made by one of her own sons. 1 

Before proceeding with the history of sci- 
ence in America during the nineteenth cen- 
tury, it might be proper, would space per- 
mit, to notice the extent to wbich its growth 
has been encouraged by the fostering baud 
of the government, and the modes in which 

1 Bacon and Locke, it is true, spoke of heat as mo- 
tion ; but with them the view was a pure hypothesis ; 
with Rumford it was a demonstrated certainty. Speak- 
ing of the paper in which it was communicated to the 
Royal Society, Professor Tyndall says: "Rumford in 
this memoir annihilated the material theory of heat. 
Nothing on the subject more powerful has since been 
written." 



this encouragement has been shown, and also 
to enumerate the principal organizations 
through which its votaries have endeavored 
to promote its progress by associated effort, 
and the channels of publication through 
which the results of their labors have been 
given to the world. With these materials 
an interesting chapter might be written, for 
which, however, we can find no place here. 
That the government of the United States, 
though it has as yet made no systematic and 
permanent provision for promoting scientific 
investigation, has not been wanting in lib- 
erality when solicited to lend its occasional 
aid to special objects of scientific interest, 
will be evident when we call to mind the 
Wilkes exploring expedition of 1838, the 
Lynch Dead Sea exploration of 1848, the 
solar parallax expedition under Gilliss in 
1849, the expedition of the Polaris in 1871, 
and the more recent provision for the dis- 
patch of parties to distant parts of the 
world to observe the transit of Venus of 
1874. But besides these instances, in which 
the advancement of science for its own sake 
has been the exclusive aim of Congressional 
appropriations, many other examples may 
be mentioned in which legislation has been 
indirectly favorable to the same end. The 
Coast Survey is, from the necessity of things, 
a scientific institution and a school for train- 
ing scientific men. The same is true of the 
public survey of the great lakes, of the 
boundary commissions, of the exploring ex- 
peditions in the heart of the continent, of 
the Naval Observatory, of tbe Nautical Al- 
manac Office, and of the special commissions 
from time to time created for investigating 
experimentally certain questions regarded 
as practical, which have nevertheless im- 
portant scientific relations, such as the heat 
developed in the combustion of coal, the te- 
nacity, rigidity, and other useful qualities of 
different descriptions of iron and steel, the 
causes producing the explosions of steam- 
boilers, and others of like character. 

Though we can attempt no history of sci- 
entific associations or organizations, there is 
one exception which may properly be made 
to this rule. The Smithsonian Institution 
is an organization unique in its character, 
which for the past thirty years has held a 
peculiar relation to the science of the coun- 
try, of which it has been, also, one of the 



295 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



moat powerful promoters. In the language 
of the will of its founder, an English gentle- 
man of wealth who had never visited this 
country, it has for its large and liheral ob- 
ject " the increase and diffusion of knowl- 
edge among men." The fund from which it 
derives its revenue is bequeathed in trust to 
the United States of America, and its affairs 
are administered by a Board of Regents ap- 
pointed principally by the Senate. During 
the infancy of the institution there was at 
one time danger that, instead of being made 
an instrumentality for the increase of knowl- 
edge by the encouragement of original re- 
search, it would become merely a depository 
of objects of interest in natural bistory or 
archaeology, and of books of general litera- 
ture, exhausting itself thus in the creation 
of a museum and a library. To this it was 
proposed to add a show of diffusing knowl- 
edge by means of popular lectures delivered 
annually in Washington during the winter. 
Such lectures were, in fact, given down to 
about 1860 ; but the danger menaced by the 
other part of the project was averted by the 
earnest zeal and conclusive logic with which 
the purposes of the founder were set forth 
and defended by the able secretary of the 
institution, Professor Joseph Henry. Thus 
for a long period of years the institution has 
employed all its available income in defray- 
ing, in whole or in part, the expense of orig- 
inal investigations, and in publishing the 
results of these, and of any others independ- 
ently made which, after careful examination 
by expert judges, have appeared to be sub- 
stantially valuable contributions to knowl- 
edge. Under the title of Smithsonian Con- 
tributions to Knowledge there have now been 
published nineteen large quarto volumes, 
embracing elaborate monographs on a large 
variety of subjects in exact science, in nat- 
ural history, in ethnology, and in linguistics, 
including among them the important astro- 
nomical researches of Walker, Newcomb, 
and Stockwell, the ingenious discussions of 
rotary motion by General Barnard, the elab- 
orate investigations of terrestrial magnetism 
by Bache, the grammar and vocabulary of 
the Dakota language by Riggs, and the 
explorations of the North American earth 
mounds by Squier and Davis. 

In addition to its usefulness in provoking 
scientific research, of which it would be dif- 



ficult to measure the value, the institution 
has also fulfilled, and is now fulfilling, a 
most important function in acting as the 
organ of a widely extended system of scien- 
tific exchanges between our own and foreign 
countries. Its correspondents and agents 
are scattered every where throughout the 
civilized world. Plants, minerals, books, 
specimens in natural history, objects of ar- 
chaeological interest — every thing, in short, 
which belongs to the material, or is service- 
able for the illustration, of science is through 
its instrumentality expeditiously forwarded 
to the remotest destination, without any ex- 
pense, except that which attends the local 
delivery, to sender or receiver. No such 
agency any where else exists. The degree 
to which it is promotive of scientific activ- 
ity, not only by stimulating individual ef- 
fort, but by bringing distant individuals 
into frequent communication with each oth- 
er, and inducing systematic co-operation, 
need hardly be insisted on. 

In passing now to the proper history of 
science itself, it is necessary to remark that 
of a subject occupying so broad a field only 
the merest outline can here be given, and 
that that outline can embrace only such 
portion of this history as is properly Amer- 
ican. Convenience also suggests that each 
department of science, or group of allied 
sciences, should be considered separately. 

In the pure mathematics our country has 
an honorable, if not a very extensive, record. 
The number of men who deserve to be call- 
ed truly eminent as mathematicians in any 
country or in any age is always compara- 
tively small, and the number of those whose 
eminence is due to real originality of genius 
is smaller still. It accordingly happens that 
of those who are most spoken of in their own 
time for the presumed profundity of their 
mathematical knowledge or their ingenu- 
ity in the use of mathematical methods the 
larger proportion leave behind them no per- 
manent monuments of this imagined and 
perhaps real greatness. Among the men 
distinguished for their mathematical ability 
whom our country has produced there are 
nevertheless a few whose published works 
have been substantial contributions to the 
advancement of their favorite science, and 
have won for them a celebrity destined to be 
enduring. In this honorable record no name 



ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERY. 



297 



stands higher than that of Nathaniel Bow- 
ditch, whose voluminous and lucid commen- 
tary on the Mecanique Celeste of Laplace not 
only eclipsed the multitude of his previous 
admirable performances, but drew from ana- 
lysts and physical astronomers of the highest 
eminence abroad most enthusiastic expres- 
sions of commendation. Professor Benjamin 
Peirce, of Harvard University, a pupil and 
friend of Bowditch, still in the vigor of life, 
stands hardly second to his master in the 
originality and value of his contributions to 
mathematical literature. His Analytic Me- 
chanics, which is professedly an attempt to 
consolidate the latest researches and the most 
exalted forms of thought of the great geom- 
eters into a consistent and uniform treatise, 
is more than it professes to be. It is rather 
an attempt — successfully accomplished — to 
carry back the fundamental principles of 
the science to a more profound and central 
origin, and thence to shorten the path to 
the most fruitful forms of research. The 
most remarkable and most original of Pro- 
fessor Peirce's publications is the descrip- 
tion of a new mathematical method, called 
by him " Linear Associative Algebra." This 
method seems to be a step in the direction 
of quaternions, but a larger one. It there- 
fore oversteps the power of human concep- 
tion to grasp its essence, while its visible 
machinery is algebraic, and in the modes 
of its use it has analogies both with alge- 
bra and with quaternions. The method is 
of too recent origin to have been largely 
developed in its capabilities or tested in 
its applications. 

Of other eminent mathematicians whose 
labors deserve a more extended notice our 
limits allow but a mere mention. The alge- 
bra of Professor Theodore Strong, the mem- 
oir on "Musical Temperament" by Professor 
A. M. Fisher, the essay of Professor A. D. 
Stanley on the "Calculus of Variations," 
Professor Patterson's " Calculus of Opera- 
tions," Professor Newton's memoirs on ques- 
tions of higher geometry and on transcend- 
ental curves, General Alvord's " Tangencies 
of Circles and Spheres," Professor Ferrel's 
" Converging Series," and his investigation 
of the movements of the atmosphere, Gen- 
eral Barnard's " Theory of the Gyroscope" 
and "Problems in Rotary Motion," are all 
valuable contributions to mathematical sci- 



ence. The "Problems" last named treat 
chiefly of the earth's rotation, and the re- 
sulting precession of the equinoxes, em- 
bracing a discussion of the relation to pre- 
cession of the earth's internal structure, 
and refuting conclusively the deductions of 
a very celebrated investigation of this sub- 
ject by the late W. Hopkins, while demon- 
strating, ou other grounds than his, the ex- 
istence of a thick rigid crust. 

ASTRONOMY. 

There are several distinct departments of 
astronomical science which are often pur- 
sued independently of each other. The eld- 
er Herschel occupied himself chiefly with 
discovery ; Tycho Brahe, with the accurate 
determination of the places of known ob- 
jects. Our gifted countryman, Mitchell, was 
especially interested in devising new meth- 
ods of observation and record ; our esteem- 
ed fellow-citizen, Mr. Rutherfurd, with the 
application of photography to astronomy. 
Some astronomers, like Newton, Lagrange, 
and Laplace at an earlier period, or like Ad- 
ams, Leverrier, Peirce, Newcomb, and Stock- 
well in our own time, have engaged in the 
theoretic investigation of the laws of celes- 
tial motion, and of the action of the heaven- 
ly bodies on each other. Others — and the 
number is large, including at present De 
la Rue, Huggins, Lockyer, Faye, and Secchi 
abroad, and Young, H. Draper, and Lang- 
ley among ourselves — have been busied in 
the fascinating study of solar and stellar 
physics. Finally, comets and shooting- 
stars, and the recently detected connection 
between these two seemingly very differ- 
ent classes of bodies, have been a subject 
of long-continued study, fruitful of inter- 
esting results, to a series of observers, 
among whom are most prominent at pres- 
ent Professor Schiaparelli, of Milan, and 
Professor Newton, of our own country. 

In connection with discovery, an interest- 
ing chapter might be written on the his- 
tory of the agencies to which discoveries 
are mainly due, that is, of observatories — a 
history which the limitation of our space 
necessarily excludes. Half a century ago 
such a thing as an astronomical observato- 
ry was unknown in the United States. At 
present the number is considerably greater 
than the necessity. Though the work of 
the observatory is the basis on which the 



298 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



theory of the existing universe must rest, it 
is not a work which needs to be indefinitely 
repeated. With the very superior instru- 
ments which the skill of recent times has 
furnished, a few observatories, judiciously 
distributed over the earth's surface, are all 
that the physical astronomer requires. 
There are at present in the United States 
not fewer than thirty astronomical obser- 
vatories, probably more. If so many had 
been needed, they would still in many cases 
have been founded in vaiu, since no suitable 
provision has accompanied their erection 
for maintaining them subsequently in use. 
Some of them, connected with the colleges 
of the country, have, perhaps, been made 
sufficiently useful for purposes of instruc- 
tion to justify their erection ; but it is per- 
fectly clear that the founders in general 
have been laboring under the delusion that 
an observatory when once brought into ex- 
istence will somehow work itself. It has 
accordingly happened that, except in the 
case of the Naval Observatory, at Washing- 
ton, that of Harvard University, and, in its 
earlier period, tbat of the Cincinnati Obser- 
vatory, the responsibility for the use of the 
instruments, provided at great expense in 
these various establishments, has fallen upon 
men overburdened with heavy duties as in- 
structors, occupying the greater part of their 
time by day, and rendering continuous sys- 
tematic observation by night physically im- 
possible. Notwithstanding these disadvan- 
tages, several of the gentlemen here referred 
to have found time in the midst of their dis- 
tractions to render so signal services to as- 
tronomical science as to connect their names 
permanently with the history of its prog- 
ress. There exists, however, no adequate 
provision, and in general no provision at 
all, for the training of observers and the 
support of observation ; and hence much 
of this costly apparatus has been hitherto 
comparatively useless for the purposes of 
practical astronomy. Still less has there 
been a provision for what is now the most 
urgent necessity of the science — the encour- 
agement and maintenance of a class of as- 
tronomers of a superior order of scientific 
culture, devoted to the study and recon- 
struction of theory. This is a considera- 
tion to which the. benefactors of this no- 
blest of sciences, who have provided it 



with so many instruments of magnificent 
proportions as monuments of their liber- 
ality speaking to the eye, would do wisely 
in the future to turn their attention. 

Some of the most interesting of the as- 
tronomical discoveries of the century have 
been due to the keen-sightedness of Ameri- 
can observers. The great telescope of the 
Cambridge Observatory was mounted in the 
summer of 1847. On the 16th day of Sep- 
tember, 1848, it was the means of rendering 
for the first time visible to human eyes the 
eighth satellite of the planet Saturn — the 
eighth in the order of discovery, though 
the seventh in the order of distance from 
the planet. Five satellites of this planet 
had been discovered in the seventeenth cen- 
tury ; two more, very close to the ring, were 
seen in 1789 by Sir William Herschel, who, 
as illustrated in this example and in sever- 
al others, seems to have been endowed with 
an almost preternatural keenness of vision ; 
but his observations were not confirmed un- 
til his son, more than forty years after (1836), 
rediscovered one of them, and caught a sin- 
gle doubtful gliinpse of the other. Ten 
years later (1846) Mr. Lassell, of Liverpool, 
recovered the remaining one. The new sat- 
ellite discovered by the Messrs. Bond is faint- 
er than either of these two extremely diffi- 
cult objects, though more distant from the 
planet than any other, except that known 
as Iapetus. Between this satellite and Ti- 
tan, the next interior, a wide gap had been 
noticed to exist, Titan revolving around 
the primary in a little less than sixteen 
days, and Iapetus in more than seventy- 
nine. Bond's satellite, which has received 
the name Hyperion, has a period of a little 
over twenty-one days, so that it is compar- 
atively near to Titan, and leaves still a large 
seemingly unoccupied space between itself 
and Iapetus. It is remarkable that Hype- 
rion was noticed by Mr. Lassell on the 18th 
of September, only two days after its dis- 
covery by Bond. 

The most wonderful object in the uni- 
verse, as well to the physical astronomer as 
to the observer who surveys the heavens 
only for the gratification of his curiosity, is 
the double or multiple ring surrounding the 
planet Saturn. The ring is certainly dou- 
ble, a wide space separating the inner, 
broader, and brighter from the outer, nar- 



SATURN'S RINGS. 



299 



rower, and less bright. Small stars have 
sometimes been seen between the ring and 
the planet. Some very good observers have 
occasionally noticed what appeared to be 
lines of division in the breadth of both the 
rings, and these appearances, together with 
the deductions of theory as to the conditions 
necessary to the stability of the system, have 
led to the general belief that the rings are 
not rigid solids. Until the year 1850, how- 
ever, only two rings had been suspected to 
exist, unless by occasional and temporary 
subdivision. But on the 11th of November 
in that year there was noticed by the Messrs. 
Bond a shadowy appearance interior to the 
broad ring, which led them to suspect the 
existence of a third and almost nebulous 
ring, having a breadth about two-thirds as 
great as that of the narrow or outer ring. 
Subsequent observations confirmed them in 
this belief; and the same appearances were 
later noticed by Dawes and Lassell in En- 
gland. An interesting question hereupon 
arose as to whether this dusky ring was of 
recent formation, or had been noticed but 
not understood before. It was ascertained 
that Galle had meutioned appearances of a 
similar kind in a memoir published in 1838 ; 
and Father Secchi testified that such had 
been noticed in the observatory at Rome as 
early as 1828. Mr. Otto Struve also adduced 
evidences from the observations of J. Cas- 
sini in 1715, and those of Halley in 1720 and 
1723, that the obscure ring had been no- 
ticed by those observers, and assumed by 
them to be a belt upon the planet itself. 
Mr. Struve created some excitement in the 
astronomical world by stating that on a 
comparison of the measurements of the ap- 
parent distance between the inner edge of 
the broad bright ring and the planet's disk 
made by his father in 1826 and by himself 
in 1851, together with an examination of 
similar measurements by Huyghens, Cas- 
sini, Bradley, Herschel, Encke, and Galle, 
he was satisfied that the inner edge of the 
bright ring is gradually approaching the 
planet, while the total breadth of the two 
rings is constantly increasing. This propo- 
sition was too startling to meet with ready 
acceptance by astronomers generally, and 
up to the present time the question remains 
where Struve left it, with, however, an ap- 
parently growing disposition to accept his 



conclusions. If it is true that the ring is 
slowly subsiding toward the planet, the hy- 
pothesis is not without plausibility that 
Bond's dusky ring may be composed of 
loosely scattered fragments, which, from 
causes possible to assign, have been accel- 
erated in their descent beyond the general 
mass. 

The astronomical discovery next in inter- 
est deserving mention, as an American con- 
tribution to science during the century, was 
remarkably enough made in the immediate 
neighborhood of the observatory which the 
successes of the Messrs. Bond had already 
made famous. Mr. Alvan Clark had just 
completed the great telescope of eighteen 
and a half inches designed for the Univer- 
sity of Mississippi, and now at Chicago, 
when on the night of January 31, 1862, his 
son, Mr. Alvan G. Clark, directing the instru- 
ment toward Sirius, the brightest of the 
fixed stars, detected almost in contact with 
it a minute point of light which he recog- 
nized immediately as a companion star. 
Curiously enough, a well-founded suspicion 
had long been entertained that this star is 
double. Minute as are the annual proper 
motions of the fixed stars in the heavens, 
they are in general uniform and well ascer- 
tained. But the motion of Sirius was long 
ago discovered by Bessel to be affected by 
an irregularity such as would be produced 
by the action of some other body revolving 
with it around a common centre. The or- 
bit of the imaginary attendant star had, in 
fact, been inferred by Peters, of Altona, and 
Safford, then of the Cambridge Observatory. 
No scrutiny with instruments then existing 
had, however, been successful in detecting 
this attendant, when the newly finished 
glass of Mr. Clark made it visible without 
effort. After its discovery it was seen with 
the Harvard equatorial and others of less 
power, but not till 1866 with the 9|-inch Mu- 
nich glass of the Naval Observatory. This 
admirable discovery, or more properly the 
construction of a glass capable of making a 
discovery so difficult, was rewarded by the 
Academy of Sciences of France by the pres- 
entation to Mr. Clark of the Lalande Medal 
— a prize annually decreed to the author of 
the most interesting discovery of the year. 

Several comets have been discovered by 
American astronomers, among which may 



300 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



be mentioned, the first of 1846, discovered 
February 26, 1846, by William C. Bond, of 
which the elliptic elements were determined 
by Peirce, giving a period of ninety-five 
years. The comet known by the name of 
Miss Maria Mitchell was first seen by her on 
October 1, 1847, at her private observatory 
in Nantucket. Two days later it was also 
seen by De Vico at Rome, and Mr. H. P. 
Tuttle at Cambridge. The comet 1862, III., 
which was discovered by Mr. Tuttle July 
18, 1862, and by Mr. Thomas Simons, of Al- 
bany, on the same evening, but later, be- 
longs to the August stream of meteoroids. 
An interesting fact in regard to Miss Mitch- 
ell's comet is that, four days after its discov- 
ery, it passed centrally over a fixed star of 
the fifth magnitude without in the slightest 
degree obscuring it. For a brief time the 
star was, in fact, so truly in the centre of 
the nebulosity that it appeared like the 
proper nucleus of the comet. 

Of the swarm of minute planets which 
occupy the place between Mars and Jupi- 
ter, where the law of Bode indicates a mem- 
ber of the solar system to be missiug, about 
one-third have been discovered by American 
observers. It is remarkable that all of this 
numerous group, now amounting to no few- 
er than 153, belong to the nineteenth centu- 
ry, the first to be detected having been dis- 
covered on the eveniug of the first day of 
the century, January 1, 1801, by Piazzi, at 
Palermo. Three others were discovered 
within the seven years next succeeding, 
after which nearly forty years elapsed with- 
out adding to the number. Up to the close 
of 1850 the total number known amounted 
to thirteen only. Within the twenty-five 
years which have since elapsed there have 
been discovered 140 more, or about six per 
annum. It is to be observed that discovery 
in recent years has been greatly facilitated 
by the Berlin star maps and other celestial 
charts, in which every star down to the 
ninth magnitude is set down. When an ob- 
ject is seen which is not in the map, there- 
fore, the probability is great that it is an as- 
teroid, and the question will be settled by a 
second observation on the following night, 
or even a few hours later on the same night. 
The first American astronomer to detect an 
asteroid previously unknown was Mr. James 
Ferguson, of the Naval Observatory, by whom 



the thirty-first of the series, now known as 
Euphrosyne, was found on September 1, 
1854. Two others were subsequently dis- 
covered by him, making three in all. Be- 
sides these, there have been discovered one 
by Searle, two by Tuttle, sixteen by Watson, 
and twenty-two by Peters, making a total 
of forty-four, all discovered within a period 
of about twenty years. 

Practical Astronomy. — The automatic reg- 
istration of time observations by means of 
electro -magnetism is an improvement in 
practical astronomy due to American inge- 
nuity. The merit of its first suggestion has 
been somewhat in dispute, but the earliest 
experimental demonstration of its feasibil- 
ity was certainly made by Professor John 
Locke, of Cincinnati, who in 1848 intro- 
duced a clock provided with a suitable 
mechanism into the circuit of the electric 
telegraph between Cincinnati and Pitts- 
burg. The distance is four hundred miles, 
and the experiment was continued for two 
hours, during which the beats were regu- 
larly registered at every station through- 
out the whole line. The application to 
astronomical observation immediately fol- 
lowed. In recognition of the value of this 
invention, Congress awarded to Dr. Locke 
the sum of ten thousand dollars, and or- 
dered a clock of the same description to 
be constructed for the Naval Observatory. 
As a recording instrument, the ordinary tel- 
egraphic register of Professor Morse was 
at first employed. More convenient forms 
of apparatus were subsequently devised by 
Professor Mitchell, Mr. Joseph Saxton, of the 
Coast Survey, and Messrs. W. C. and George 
P. Bond, who introduced the regulator which 
has since been so almost universally em- 
ployed in these instruments, known as 
Bond's spring governor. More recently 
(1871) a printing chronograph has been in- 
vented by Professor George W. Hough, of 
the Dudley Observatory, which records to 
the hundredths of a secoud, and saves to 
the observer who employs it the labor and 
time required for deciphering and record- 
ing in figures the indications of the regis- 
ter in common use. Tlie electro-magnetic 
method of recording transits was adopted 
without delay in the observatories of the 
United States, and soon after found its way 
into those of Great Britain and the conti- 



IMPROVEMENT OF INSTRUMENTS. 



301 



nent of Europe, where it was known as the 
American method. Of its great value in 
promoting accuracy it is not necessary to 
speak ; but only those who have had expe- 
rience in observation can adequately ap- 
preciate the degree to which it has lighten- 
ed the labor of the observer. Previously to 
its introduction the clock divided with the 
object viewed the observer's attention, and 
the necessity for unceasing vigilance was 
exhausting in the extreme. If nothing else 
had been gained by it but this, the benefit 
would be incalculable. 

The introduction of the electric chrono- 
graph into observatories furnished a very 
simple means of determining differences of 
longitude between any two places connect- 
ed by a telegraphic wire. These determi- 
nations are made by comparing the exact 
times of transit of a given celestial object 
over the meridians of both places, a single 
clock giving the times for both, or by trans- 
mitting time signals alternately in opposite 
directions compared with the clocks at both 
ends. The earliest observations of this kind 
were made in January, 1849, between Wash- 
ington and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The 
method has since been brought into very 
extensive use throughout the world. In 
1867, and again in 1871 and in 1872, it was 
employed to determine the difference of 
longitude between Greenwich and Wash- 
ington, by means, in the first instance, of 
the Anglo-American cable, and, in the sec- 
ond and third, of the French, from Brest to 
St. Pierre, and Danbury, Massachusetts. It 
may be interesting to compare the results 
thus obtained with those of the great chron- 
ometric expeditions of 1849 and 1855 be- 
tween Cambridge and Liverpool — expedi- 
tions which, in the words of Mr. W. C. Bond, 
"for the magnitude and completeness of 
their equipments have not been equaled by 
any of the similar undertakings of Euro- 
pean governments. Even the 'Expedition 
Chronometrique' of Struve was on a scale 
much less extensive." In 1855 fifty -two 
nautical chronometers were transported six 
times between Cambridge and Liverpool, 
giving nearly three hundred individual lon- 
gitude determinations. The difference of 
longitude obtained was 4/t. 44m. 31.8s. Pre- 
vious expeditions had given 4/i. 44m. 30.6s., 
showing a difference between the two of 



1.2s. The cable results (omitting hours and 
minutes) were : 1867, 31.00s. ; 1871, 30.96s. ; 
1872, 30.99s., the largest discrepancy being 
only four one-hundredths of a second. 

In observing for longitude, the velocity 
of propagation of electric impulses in the 
wires of the circuit becomes a matter re- 
quiring attention, and thus the telegraph 
has become the means of throwing light 
upon this interesting question in physics. 
The results obtained have differed very 
widely, being dependent on difference of 
material of the conductor, difference of cross- 
section, and largely upou differences of sur- 
rounding conditions. In the ordinary iron 
wires of the American telegraphic lines the 
velocity seems not to exceed fifteen or six- 
teen thousand miles per second. 

Improvement of Instruments. — Until about 
1850 the observatories of the United States 
were furnished with instruments of foreign 
manufacture exclusively. Since that time 
the telescopes of American opticians have 
rivaled, if they have not surpassed, in ex- 
cellence those of the most celebrated con- 
structors of the Old World. The 12^-inch 
equatorial of the Michigan University is one 
of many admirable instruments produced 
by Mr. Henry Fitz, of New York, an ingen- 
ious artisan, who was removed by a prema- 
ture death just as his reputation had been 
firmly established, and as he was preparing 
for a bolder attempt than any of those in 
which he had been previously so successful 
— the construction of an objective of twen- 
ty-four inches aperture. Mr. Charles A. 
Spencer, of Canastota, New York, in the year 
1848 suddenly acquired an extraordinary 
celebrity for superior skill in constructing 
objectives for microscopes. Having proved 
himself to be without a superior in this 
field, he turned his attention to the con- 
struction of telescopes with a success no 
less signal. One of the most remarkable 
examples on record of a career commenced 
without previous preparation, rather late 
in life, in a most difficult art, and leading 
in the end to the highest eminence, is to be 
found in the history of Mr. Alvan Clark, of 
Cambridge, Massachusetts, who undertook 
in 1844, without thought of going further, 
to assist his sou, a lad of seventeen, in the 
grinding of a metal speculum. The earlier 
years of Mr. Clark had beeu spent upon a 



302 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



farm. After the age of twenty-two he had 
occupied himself with engraving for cali- 
co-printing, and subsequently with portrait 
painting, which pursuit he followed for ten 
years with eminent success. In assisting 
his son, his object was to further the aspi- 
ration of the youth to become a professional 
optician, and this he hoped to accomplish 
by himself learning in order that he might 
teach. After several experiments with met- 
als, he was encouraged by Professor Peirce 
to undertake a refractor. The son hesita- 
ted ; the father allowed himself to be per- 
suaded, and his boldness was rewarded by 
such a degree of success as to lead him grad- 
ually to abandon all other occupations and 
to become a professional optician himself. 
The great excellence of his work was first 
justly appreciated by Mr. W. R. Dawes, of 
Haddenham, England, a distinguished as- 
tronomer, possessed of a keen vision, and a 
critical judge of instruments. Mr. Dawes 
had purchased two or three glasses of seven 
or eight inches aperture of Mr. Clark, and 
had made him well known in England be- 
fore his own countrymen became aware how 
superior an artisan they had among them. 

In February, 1860, the sum of $10,000 was 
appropriated by the trustees of the Univer- 
sity of Mississippi to defray the expense of 
an object-glass for an equatorial telescope 
to be placed in the observatory of that in- 
stitution. The writer of this article was 
intrusted with the responsibility of select- 
ing the artisan in whose hands this impor- 
tant work should be placed. His choice fell 
upon Mr. Clark, and instructions were given 
that the glass should be made of sufficient 
size to exhaust the entire appropriation. 
According to a scale of prices which Mr. 
Clark had arranged, a glass worth $10,000 
should measure about seventeen and a half 
inches. The diameter was more than twice 
as great as that of any which Mr. Clark had 
made before ; and it was his preference and 
his proposition to prepare one of exactly the 
size of the Munich glass in the Cambridge 
Observatory, viz., fifteen inches, in order that 
he might compare it with that by placing it 
in the same tube and observing the same 
objects on the same nights. Mr. George P. 
Bond, then in charge of the observatory, 
expressed his entire willingness to afford 
this opportunity of comparison, but advised 



against the limitation of size, saying, "Al- 
ways improve if you can upon the last thing 
done." Mr. Clark finally consented to at- 
tempt the larger diameter, and the neces- 
sary disks were ordered. They were consid- 
erably in excess of the size necessary for the 
glass proposed, and on careful examination 
were found to be perfect to the extreme 
borders, so that Mr. Clark reported that it 
would be quite possible to grind them to a 
diameter of eighteen and a half inches, ex- 
ceeding by an inch the size which the appro- 
priation allowed. It seemed an unjustifiable 
sacrifice to cut down to such an extent a 
material so excellent, and Mr. Clark was de- 
sired, in reply, to work the disks to as large 
a diameter as they would bear, and assured 
that the appropriation would be increased 
accordingly. Under these circumstances he 
proceeded with the work with such rapidity 
that in June, 1861, he was able to give no- 
tice that the glass would be ready for a pre- 
liminary examination in the month of Au- 
gust succeeding. The troubles of the times 
prevented such an examination, and no one 
of those with whom the order for this in- 
strument originated has ever had an oppor- 
tunity of looking through it. The latest 
achievement of Mr. Clark has been the con- 
struction of the grand 26 -inch objective 
erected in 1873 in the Naval Observatory at 
Washington. 

Some of the most successful constructors 
of astronomical instruments in our country 
are to be found among the astronomers 
themselves. Mr. Lewis M. Rutherfurd, of 
New York, is the originator of a depart- 
ment of practical astronomy requiring the 
use of instruments specially adapted to its 
purposes ; and as the most expeditious and 
satisfactory mode of providing these instru- 
ments, he resolved to construct them him- 
self. His idea was to make photography 
subservient to the uses of astronomy, and 
especially of urauography. Considering how 
rare are the occasions in which atmospheric 
conditions are altogether favorable to the 
observation of difficult objects in the heav- 
ens, and how large is the necessary con- 
sumption of time in making measurements 
of position and distance between the objects 
observed, it occurred to him that if these 
favorable opportunities should be seized to 
make exact photographic maps of the groups 



MR. RUTHERFUED'S PHOTOGRAPHIC APPARATUS. 



303 



under examination, measurements of these 
maps might take the place of direct meas- 
urements of the stars, and that thus a single 
evening might be made productive of results 
as numerous and valuable as those obtained 
in many months in the ordinary course of 
observation. His first attempts at a prac- 
tical realization of this idea were made with 
a reflecting telescope, for the reason that a 
parabolic speculum is free from aberration 
both of color and figure. The Cassegrainian 
form was adopted, as best suited to the pur- 
pose ; but the tremors produced by passing 
street vehicles were so largely magnified by 
the double reflection in this instrument that 
he was soon compelled to abandon it for 
the refractor. A little experience, however, 
taught him that the refracting telescopes in 
common use, whatever their degree of excel- 
lence for purely optical purposes, would not 
furnish him celestial photographs exhibit- 
ing the stars with the degree of sharpness 
which his plan required. Though the lumi- 
nous rays are well concentrated, the actinic 
rays are scattered, giving indistinct images 
of the larger stars, and failing to exhibit 
minute ones at all. He therefore undertook 
the construction of an objective corrected 
for actinic effect, without regard to color. 
The whole of the work, theoretic and prac- 
tical, was done by himself, and about the year 
1863 he completed an actin-aplauatic object- 
ive of eleven and a quarter inches aperture, 
which gave results entirely satisfactory. 
With this he speedily obtained many sharp- 
ly defined maps of star groups upon glass, 
and it remained only to effect the intended 
measurements upon these maps. Here was 
presented a new mechanical problem of pe- 
culiar difficulty. No known micrometric ap- 
paratus was adapted either in form or in di- 
mensions to effect these measurements. Mr. 
Rutherfurd met the difficulty with his char- 
acteristic ingenuity, and with his own hands 
constructed an instrument in which, by 
means of an observing microscope directed 
toward the plate, and having motion in two 
'directions at right angles to each other, the 
co-ordinates of position of the objects ob- 
served may be measured with a delicacy 
which leaves nothing to be desired. In the 
original form of this instrument a microme- 
ter screw was depended on to give these di- 
mensions, and an immense amount of labor 



was expended in the construction of such a 
screw and in determining its error. The 
investigation resulted, however, in demon- 
strating that the error of the screw is not 
constant, no matter how faultless the work- 
manship or how excellent the material. 
Discarding the screw, therefore, for pur- 
poses of measurement, Mr. Rutherfurd in- 
troduces into the instrument, as at present 
constructed, two auxiliary microscopes trav- 
eling with the observing microscope, one in 
each direction, and reading the distances 
traveled upon fixed scales ruled on glass. 
In a paper read before the National Acad- 
emy of Sciences in 1866 Mr. Rutherfurd gave 
an account of his method ; and at the same 
meeting a discussion of measurements made 
at his observatory upon x>hotographs of the 
Pleiades was presented by Dr. B. A. Gould, 
who reached the conclusion that the micro- 
metric measurements of a single such plate, 
with the customary corrections for refrac- 
tion, etc., would give results about as accu- 
rate as those obtained by Bessel with thir- 
teen years' labor — the time employed by him 
in mapping this group. Though this meth- 
od has not yet been adopted in public ob- 
servatories, it can not bo doubted that it is 
destined to be instrumental in the future in 
largely promoting the advancement of ura- 
nographical science. 

Another American astronomer, whose in- 
genuity in the construction of instruments 
is no less remarkable than his skill iu the 
use of them, Dr. Henry Draper, has devoted 
himself to the improvement of reflecting 
telescopes. The use of silvered glass for as- 
tronomical specula had been suggested by 
Foucault, as being a material lighter and 
less brittle than speculum metal, and as re- 
flecting a larger proportion of the light; 
and he had practically illustrated the value 
of this suggestion by actually griuding and 
silvering one or two such specula with his 
own hands. With no light to guide him but 
the knowledge of these facts, Dr. Draper un- 
dertook an investigation of the best mode of 
proceeding in the construction of such spec- 
ula, recording the results of his experiments 
as he went on ; and having at length at- 
tained a triumphant success, he published 
his method among the Smithsonian Contri- 
butions, in an elaborate memoir, which has 
become a standard authority on the subject, 



304 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



and is continually quoted as such at the 
present day. The telescope described in 
this memoir is of fifteen and a half inches 
aperture, and it was for a long time the 
largest in the country; but it is now sur- 
passed by one of twenty-eight inches, also 
constructed by Dr. Draper, and mounted in 
his observatory equatorially under a dome. 
With both these telescopes Dr. Draper has 
taken splendid photographs of the moon, 
one representing the satellite in the third 
quarter, which has borne an enlargement to 
fifty inches in diameter ; and also the spec- 
troscopic photographs of Alpha Lyra?, men- 
tioned later in this article. 

Physical Astronomy. — No incident in the 
history of astronomy has ever excited more 
universal interest than the detection, in Au- 
gust, 1846, by a method purely mathematical, 
of a planet which had been previously lurk- 
ing unseen upon the confines of the system 
ever since the creation. This marvelous 
achievement, of which the history is too 
well known to need repetition here, was 
simultaneously accomplished by two foreign 
astronomers, and does not belong to Ameri- 
can science. But it is a curious fact that 
the planet thus discovered fell immediately 
after into the hands of American astrono- 
mers, and that they have made it practically 
their own ever since. Owing to the exceed- 
ingly slow motion of the body, the elements 
of its orbit could not be determined from 
the observations of a few months. Assum- 
ing the orbit to be circular, several Europe- 
an astronomers reached early and concur- 
rently the conclusion that its mean distance 
from the sun is less than the discoverers had 
supposed by between five and six hundred 
millions of miles. But the first approxi- 
mately correct theory of its motions was 
wrought out by Professor Scars C. Walker, 
of the Naval Observatory at Washington, in 
February, 1847. When Herschel discovered 
the planet Uranus in 1781, Lexell was ena- 
bled to determine its orbit by means of ob- 
servations made of the same body (supposed 
then to be a fixed star) by Bradley and Mayer 
nearly thirty years before ; and the number 
of such previous accidental observations of 
this body which have since been discovered 
amounts to no less than nineteen. It was 
naturally hoped that the examination of 
star catalogues of earlier years would fur- 



nish some similar help to the solution of the 
problem presented by Neptune. Of these 
catalogues, however, most were for one rea- 
son or another useless in this inquiry. One 
only offered a possibility that the newly 
discovered body might have been by good 
fortune recorded in it. This was the His- 
toire Celeste of Lacaille, embracing 50,000 
stars ; and Mr. Walker soon discovered that 
Lacaille had swept over the probable path 
of the planet on two days nearly following 
each other — the 8th and 10th of May, 1795. 
Having, therefore, from the observations 
made at Washington, combined with those 
received from Europe, computed as well as 
he could the place of the body for these 
dates, varying the elements so as to include 
the entire region within which it could pos- 
sibly have been at that time, he selected 
from Lalande all the stars within one de- 
gree of the computed path. There were 
nine of these, but among the nine one only 
seemed likely to be the planet. The ques- 
tion then presented itself, Is this star still 
in the place in which Lalande saw it ? Two 
days after this question had been raised by 
Mr. Walker, the telescope of the Washing- 
ton Observatory was directed to the spot, 
and found it vacant. Assuming, therefore, 
this missing star to have been the planet, 
Mr. Walker computed an elliptic orbit which 
represented with gratifying precision all the 
modern observations. The elliptic elements 
first obtained were, however, only approxi- 
mate. In order to their more exact deter- 
mination it was necessary that the theory 
of the perturbations should be revised. 
Here Professor Peirce, of Harvard Universi- 
ty, lent his powerful assistance, and with 
the perturbations furnished by him, and re- 
vised normal places, Walker computed an 
ephemeris of the planet which he published 
in the Smithsonian Contributions. The only 
attempt at a theory of Neptune made 
abroad was by Kowalski, of Kasan, Russia, 
in 1855 ; but this, though formed on a much 
larger number of recent observations, did 
not represent the motions of the body more 
exactly than that of Walker. 

The ephemerides founded on these early 
theories were affected more or less with er- 
ror. Toward 1865 the errors were increasing 
with rapidity, and it was evident that with- 
out a new determination of the orbit, they 



NEWCOMB'S THEORY OF NEPTUNE. 



305 



would reach, before the end of the century, 
the serious amount of 5' of longitude. Pro- 
fessor Simon Newcomh, of the Naval Ob- 
servatory, Washington, now addressed him- 
self to the laborious task of reconstructing 
the theory from the foundation. His re- 
sults are published in the Smithsonian Con- 
tributions, and embrace (1) a determination 
of the elements of the orbit from observa- 
tions extending through an arc of 40° ; (2) 
an inquiry whether the mass of Uranus can 
be determined from the motion of Neptune ; 
(3) an examination of the question whether 
these motions indicate the action of an ex- 
tra-Neptunian planet ; (4) tables and formu- 
lae for finding the place of Neptune at any 
time, but more particularly between the 
years 1600 and 2000. 

In the computation of the tables the ele- 
ments adopted are not the mean elements, 
but their values at the present time as af- 
fected by secular inequalities and inequali- 
ties of long period, particularly that of 4300 
years arising out of the near approach of 
the mean motion of Uranus to twice and a 
half that of Neptune, these being adapted 
to give the place of the planet with the 
highest degree of accuracy during the pe- 
riod for which the tables are specially de- 
signed, i. e., till the year 2000. The work is 
one involving an enormous amount of labor. 
As to the mass of Uranus, Professor New- 
comb concludes that no trustworthy value 
can be deduced from the motions of Nep- 
tune, nor, had this body been unknown, 
could even its existence have been detect- 
ed from all the observations of the exterior 
planet hitherto made. It results, almost 
of course, that no evidence yet appears of 
the existence of any still more distant plan- 
et remaining yet undiscovered. 

Soon after the publication of Professor 
Walker's " Elements of Neptune," Professor 
Peirce, in a communication to the American 
Academy of Arts and Sciences, after demon- 
strating that this planet, with the mass de- 
duced from Bond's observations of Lassell's 
satellite, and with the orbit assigned by 
Walker, would fully reconcile all the mod- 
ern observations and all the ancient acci- 
dental ones better than the hypothetical 
planet of Leverrier or Adams (Flamsteed's 
observation of 1600 being discordant with 
Adams to the extent of 50" and with Lever- 
•20 



rier to 20", but harmonizing with the com- 
putation from the Walker and Peirce theo- 
ry within a single second), ventured upon 
the bold assertion that the planet actually 
discovered by Galle, searching under Lever- 
rier's direction, was not the planet predict- 
ed or expected, but a very different body, 
which occupied that place at that time only 
by a happy accident. Leverrier had fixed 
the distance of his planet from the sun at 
36.154 times the earth's distance, and Pro- 
fessor Peirce demonstrated that at the dis- 
tance 35.3 (at which a planet would have a 
periodical time equal to twice and a half 
that of Uranus) so important a change takes 
place in the character of the perturbations 
as to make it impossible to extend to the 
space within that distance any investiga- 
tions relating to the space beyond. The 
observed distance is slightly over 30 ; aud 
it appears that a second similar peculiarity 
occurs at 30.4, where a planet would have 
a period just double that of Uranus. The 
perturbations produced by it on this latter 
would, therefore, for a twofold reason, be 
of very different character from those re- 
sulting from the supposed planet at the dis- 
tance of 36. Though these criticisms of 
Professor Peirce are well founded, and have 
never been satisfactorily answered, yet they 
can not materially affect our estimate of 
the merit of Adams and Leverrier. A plan- 
et such as that indicated by. their analysis 
Avould have produced very nearly the act- 
ually observed irregularities of motion of. 
Uranus, and must have been occupying very 
nearly the place in the heavens of that which 
was actually found. Any planet capable of 
doing this must have been in this neighbor- 
hood at the time of the discovery, and it 
was the merit of the analysis that it indi- 
cated the quarter in which the disturbing 
body was to be looked for — a merit which 
remains, though the actual planet differs 
from the planet predicted, in mass, distance, 
and period. 

Besides his "Theory of Neptune," Profess- 
or Newcomb has made numerous very val- 
uable contributions to physical astronomy. 
His " Investigation of the Orbit of Uranus," 
in the Smithsonian Contributions for 1873, is 
a work of great labor, commenced as early 
as 1859, but necessarily deferred till after 
the completion of the "Theory of Neptune." 



306 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



In 1871 he published in Liouville's Jour- 
nal, Paris, a " Theory of the Perturbations 
of the Moon produced by the Action of the 
Planets." Of this very able and very orig- 
inal investigation it is sufficient to cite the 
opinion expressed by Professor Cayley, pres- 
ident of the Royal Astronomical Society of 
London, who pronounces it, "from the bold- 
ness of the conception and the beauty of 
the results, a very remarkable memoir, con- 
stituting an important addition to theoret- 
ical dynamics." 

Another very interesting memoir by Pro- 
fessor Newcomb embraces an investigation 
of the secular variations and mutual rela- 
tions of the orbits of the asteroids, for the 
purpose of testing the question, from a the- 
oretic point of view, whether the theory 
of Olbers, that these bodies are the frag- 
ments of a single shattered planet, is ten- 
able or not. Twenty-five asteroids are in- 
cluded in the comparison, and the conclusion 
is unfavorable to the hypothesis in question. 

In the Washington observations for 1865 
there appeared an investigation by Profess- 
or Newcomb of the value of the solar par- 
allax, reached by a discussion of the obser- 
vations made in 1862 at six observatories in 
the northern hemisphere and two in the 
southern, and a combination of these with 
other results furnished by micrometrical 
measures of Mars by Professor Hall, the 
parallactic equation of the moon, the lunar 
equation of the earth, and finally the tran- 
sit of Venus of 1769 recomputed by Pro- 
fessor Powalky. The inference is that the 
true parallax is 8.85", with a probable error 
of 0.013". Apparently the conclusion from 
the transit of 1874 will not be far from 8.87", 
a result very near to that previously ob- 
tained by Professor Newcomb. 

The great geometers who succeeded New- 
ton in applying the principle of gravitation 
to the explanation of planetary motions as- 
sume thatj those minute inequalities, of which 
the effects only become sensible after long 
intervals, and produce considerable changes 
only after many centuries, or, perhaps, myr- 
iads of centuries, are developed uniformly 
with the time — a supposition which answer- 
ed the immediate purpose, though it is by 
no means true. Yet a knowledge of the 
laws which govern these inequalities is im- 
portant to the settlement of a number of 



interesting questions, especially such as con- 
cern the stability of the system, and the vi- 
cissitudes of heat and cold to which our own 
planet has been manifestly subjected in the 
distant past. Lagrange pointed out the 
mathematical criterion by which the gen- 
eral question of stability might be deter- 
mined. Its application required a knowl- 
edge of the masses of the planets. These 
were not accurately known, but by substi- 
tuting approximate values for them he was 
able to announce that none of the varia- 
tions of the planetary elements could go on 
increasing forever. Laplace went further 
than this, and proved that, provided the di- 
rection of revolution is the same for all the 
planets, the stability of the system is inde- 
pendent of the masses. In this case he 
showed that the sum of the products of the 
several masses by the squares of the eccen- 
tricities and the square roots of the mean 
distances is constant, and that if the eccen- 
tricities are small, the variations will be 
small, so that the system will not only be 
stable, but will undergo no large departures 
from its mean condition. This is the state 
of things in our solar system. The actual 
condition of physical astronomy at present 
has seemed to demand a more complete in- 
vestigation of this intricate subject, and 
such an investigation has been recently 
undertaken and successfully accomplished 
by Mr. J. N. Stockwell, of Cleveland, Ohio, 
whose elaborate memoir relating to it has 
been published among the Smithsonian Con- 
tributions to Knowledge. The object of the 
investigation has been to determine the nu- 
merical values of the secular changes of the 
elements of all the planetary orbits. The 
elements considered are four : the eccentric- 
ities and inclinations of the orbits, and the 
longitudes of the nodes and of the perihe- 
lia. The fluctuations of value are largest 
in the case of Mercury, and smallest in the 
case of Neptune. We are concerned chiefly 
with what relates to our own planet, and 
more especially with the fluctuations in the 
eccentricity of its orbit. This eccentricity 
may vary between the limits zero and 
0.0694, involving a difference between the 
aphelion and perihelion distance of the 
earth from the sun of 13,000,000 miles, and 
also a difference between the duration of 
the summer and the winter half year, of thir- 



PEIRCE, MAXWELL, AND ALEXANDER. 



307 



ty-two days. It can hardly now be doubted 
that to these changes of eccentricity have 
been due the remarkable vicissitudes of cli- 
mate to which, as geology informs us, the 
earth has been subjected. At present the 
winter of the southern hemisphere occurs in 
aphelion, and is longer than the summer by 
eight days. The consequence is that the 
south pole is capped with massive ice, which 
occupies an area of probably more than 2000 
miles in diameter. When the eccentricity 
is maximum, the hemisphere which has the 
winter in aphelion is probably ice-bound 
nearly or quite down to the tropic. 

The stability of the Saturnian system and 
the mechanical condition of the material of 
Saturn's rings form the subject of an impor- 
tant memoir read by Professor B. Peirce at 
the meeting of the American Association for 
the Advancement of Science held at Cincin- 
nati in 1851. The conclusion arrived at is 
that the rings could not possibly be stable 
unless sustained by the mutual attraction 
between them and the inner satellites ; and 
consequently that, in the absence of such sat- 
ellites, they could have no existence. Also, 
that inasmuch as no solid material known is 
sufficiently tenacious to resist without rupt- 
ure the immense divellent forces to which a 
solid ring under such circumstances must be 
subjected, therefore the rings must be fluid, 
and not solid. Laplace had recognized the 
difficulty attendant on the hypothesis of a 
continuous solid ring of such breadth, and 
had therefore assumed that the rings, though 
apparently presenting continuous plane sur- 
faces, are nevertheless divided into many 
concentric and comparatively narrow rings. 
He also perceived that such rings would 
necessarily be in a condition of unstable 
equilibrium with the planet in case their 
centres of gravity should coincide, as would 
seem from their appearance to be most prob- 
able, with their centres of figure ; and he ac- 
cordingly supposed that there exist irregu- 
larities in the disposition of their substance 
imperceptible to us, which, by displacing the 
centres of gravity, give them the necessary 
stability. He failed to show that these two 
hypotheses can both be true and at the same 
time consistent with the optical phenomena, 
and, in fact, left the theory of this system 
incomplete. In 1857 Mr. J. Clerk Maxwell, 
in a prize essay presented to the University 



of Cambridge, in England, investigated these 
hypotheses of Laplace, and showed conclu- 
sively that they are untenable. On the hy- 
pothesis of fluidity he investigated the tidal 
movements which must take place in the 
rings, and rejected equally this supposition. 
But his analysis did not extend to the move- 
ment of the rings in mass, and therefore it 
is not in conflict with the view of Professor 
Peirce. If this be discarded, there remains 
no other but to suppose the rings to be made 
up of innumerable small discrete solid mass- 
es so near together that, in a zone having 
the generally admitted thickness of one or 
two hundred miles, they present to a dis- 
tant observer the appearance of a contin- 
uous solid. This view is that which is held 
by Mr. E. A. Proctor. 

Few of our American astronomers have 
contributed more abundantly to the litera- 
ture of the science than Professor Stephen 
Alexander, of Princeton. In 1843 Professor 
Alexander presented to the American Philo- 
sophical Society an elaborate memoir upon 
the physical phenomena attending eclipses, 
transits, and occultations, which excited 
much interest in the astronomical world. 
In 1874 there was published among the 
Smithsonian Contributions a paper by the 
same astronomer, entitled, "Exposition of 
certain Harmonies of the Solar System." 
The design is to show inductively a tendency 
in nature to the arrangement of the plan- 
ets according to a law of distances from the 
sun's centre, in which the distance of each 
succeeding planet is five-ninths of that of 
the last preceding, and to explain the actual 
departures from this law in the existing so- 
lar system by the supposition that in one or 
two instances two planets (called, therefore, 
half-planets) have been formed in the place 
of one. The earth and Venus constitute a 
pair of this kind. This ingenious specula- 
tion may be classed among the curiosities 
of astronomy, as it does not appear practi- 
cable to test its probability by mathemat- 
ical analysis. Of the numerous other in- 
teresting astronomical papers of Professor 
Alexander the limitations on our space pro- 
hibit us from making mention. 

In the year 1849 Professor Daniel Kirk- 
wood, then of Delaware College, Newark, 
now of the State University of Indiana, an- 
nounced a remarkable law connecting the 



303 



SCIENTIFIC PEOGRESS. 



masses and distances of the planets of the 
solar system and their periods of rotation 
on their axes. To understand this, let it be 
premised that between any two planets suc- 
ceeding each other in order as numbered 
from the sun outward, there is, when the 
bodies are in conjunction at their mean dis- 
tances, a point of equal attraction, that is 
to say, a point in which a body free to move 
would be held in equilibrio by the opposing 
attractions of the two planets. Suppose 
these neutral points to bo found for all the 
planets of the system, and the distance be- 
tween the two neutral points above and be- 
low each planet to be called the diameter 
of the sphere of attraction of that planet, 
then, according to this law, it will be true 
that the cubes of these diameters for any 
two planets will be to each other as the 
squares of their respective numbers of rota- 
tions during one sidereal revolution of each. 
This law was subjected to a close examina- 
tion by Professor Sears C. Walker in 1850, 
with a favorable conclusion. It is to be 
observed, however, that the uncertainty ex- 
isting as to the masses of several of the 
planets, and as to the periods of rotation of 
some of them, gives to this conclusion the 
character of a probable rather than of a 
certain result. In order to extend the anal- 
ogy throughout the system, Mr. Walker in- 
terpolates a planet in the region of the aster- 
oids between Mars and Jupiter, which he 
places very nearly at the distance given by 
Bode's law. He finds also that if there ex- 
ists a planet nearer the sun than Mercury, 
its distance must be one-fifth that of the 
earth, or about 18,000,000 miles. For the 
doubtful masses, Mr. Walker finds that the 
values demanded by the law are within the 
limits, often pretty wide, of those actually 
employed by different authorities in the in- 
vestigations of physical astronomy and in 
the construction of tables. It will only be 
after a higher degree of perfection shall be 
attained in the theory of every planet than 
has yet been reached, that the accuracy of 
Kirk wood's analogy can be conclusively 
tested. 

Solar rhysics. — The physical condition of 
the sun has occupied very much of late 
years the attention of the scientific world. 
Ever since the invention of the telescope 
the solar spots have been observed with 



careful and curious interest, and these, to- 
gether with the varying features of the 
photosphere itself, when minutely examined, 
led early to a general though hardly univer- 
sal acquiescence in the opinion expressed by 
Wilson in the Philosophical Transactions of 
1774, and adopted by Sir William Herschel, 
that the luminous surface which we see is 
not the surface of a solid. The question 
what is beneath this surface remained a 
subject of controversy ; and on any hypoth- 
esis of the state of the sun's mass, the essen- 
tial nature of the spots and the causes pro- 
ducing them were matters equally unsettled. 
The vastly improved instruments of recent 
years, the enqdoyinent of photography in 
aid of observation, and above all, the appli- 
cation of the spectroscope to the study of 
the chromosphere and the photosphere, have 
shed a flood of light upon this difficult sub- 
ject, which is likely soon to harmonize all 
opinions, though it can hardly be said to 
have done so yet. 

Immediately after the erection of the 
great Munich achromatic at the Harvard 
Observatory, this splendid instrument was 
employed by Mr. W. C. Bond in a continu- 
ous series of observations of the solar spots 
continued for a period of more than two 
years, maps of the spots being carefully 
drawn at every observation. The results 
are published in full in the Annals of the 
Harvard Observatory, and furnish a valuable 
means of studying the varying aspects of 
the spots, their growth, decline, and dura- 
tion. More recently many foreign observers 
have devoted themselves to the investiga- 
tion ; among whom may be mentioned Mr. 
De la Rue, Mr. Balfour Stewart, and Mr. 
Loewy in England, who have given special 
attention to the laws governing the varia- 
tions of the total area of sun spot and its 
distribution over the solar disk ; Mr. Faye, 
in France, and Father Secchi, in Rome, who 
have engaged not only in observation, but 
in speculations on theory. The British ob- 
servers arrived at the conclusion that the 
maxima and minima of spot development 
are periodic, the period coinciding with the 
synodical revolution of the planet Venus, to 
the influence of which body they therefore 
ascribe it. They attribute a similar and 
perhaps as powerful an effect to Jupiter; 
but in this case the irregularities are less, 



SOLAR PHYSICS. 



309 



on account of the greater distance of the 
disturbing body. Professor Looinis, of New 
Haven, investigated the question of the pe- 
riod of maximum, in a paper published in 
1870, arriving at the conclusion, somewhat 
different from that above mentioned, that 
the period is determined by Jupiter, and is 
about ten years ; the magnitude of the max- 
imum fluctuating, and dependent on Venus, 
with irregularities unaccounted for still 
outstanding. As to the sun's physical con- 
stitution, Professor Sterry Hunt is the au- 
thor of a theory which is essentially a part 
of his theory of chemical geology, according 
to which the solar sphere consists wholly 
of matter in a gaseous condition, all the el- 
ements being mingled but not combined, 
their affinities being held in check by the 
intensity of the heat. The partial cooling 
of the surface by radiation depresses the 
temperature to the point at which combina- 
tion is |)ossible, and thus are formed vast 
volumes of finely divided solid or liquid 
matter, which, suspended in the surround- 
ing gases, become intensely luminous, and 
form the source of the solar light. This 
view is sustained also by Mr. Faye and by 
Mr. Balfour Stewart, but is dissented from 
by Father Secchi, who inclines to believe 
the luminous envelope to form a kind of 
liquid or viscous shell. Recent observa- 
tions by Professor S. P. Langley, with the 
admirable 13-inch objective of the Alle- 
ghany Observatory, have furnished proba- 
bly the most conclusive evidence on this 
subject which has yet been obtained, and 
are entirely favorable to the theory of Pro- 
fessor Hunt. Professor Langley's papers 
have been published in the American Journal 
of Science for 1874 and 1875, and are full of 
interest not only as to the phenomena of 
the spots, but as to the minute features of 
the sun's general superficies. Accompany- 
ing his latest paper is a magnificent en- 
graved illustration from a drawing of a 
typical solar spot observed in December, 
1873. It represents what is commonly call- 
ed the penumbra as being formed of long- 
drawn luminous filaments which in their 
curvature give evidence of gyratory move- 
ments, indicating that the spots are formed 
by tremendous vortices spirally ascending 
or descending. Professor Langley remarks 
of the apparently black centre or nucleus 



of the spot, that he has found it by direct 
experiment, when all extraneous light is 
excluded, to be not only intrinsically bright, 
but in supportably intense to the naked eye. 

One of the most interesting contributions 
to the knowledge of the solar physics was 
the discovery in 1871 by Professor C. A. 
Young of that comparatively limited but 
well-defined solar envelope called the chro- 
mosphere, where the lines which in the or- 
dinary solar spectrum are black become re- 
versed, and assume the brilliant tints which 
characterize the spectra of the elements to 
which they belong, as seen in experiments 
artificially instituted. Professor Young's 
preliminary chart of the lines thus seen and 
its subsequent extension will be referred to 
later. 

A very ingenious device recently suggest- 
ed by Professor A. M. Mayer, of Hoboken, 
for the study of the laws of the distribution 
of heat upon the sun's surface is the latest 
addition which has fallen under our notice 
to the means of investigating the physical 
condition of that body. The double iodide 
of copper and mercury becomes discolored 
when raised to a certain ascertained temper- 
ature. Let a thin paper, blackened on one 
surface and coated with the iodide on the 
other, receive the solar image on the black- 
ened side, the aperture of the object-glass 
being reduced to such an extent that no dis- 
coloration of the salt may occur. Then let 
the aperture be gradually enlarged. Pres- 
ently a spot will appear, which marks in the 
image the point of maximum temperature 
in the solar disk. By successive additional 
enlargements of aperture the spot on the 
paper will be correspondingly enlarged, 
and its borders will indicate the isothermal 
lines of the solar disk. Several interesting 
discoveries already made by the application 
of this method our narrow limits will not 
permit us to notice here. 

Comets. — In 1843 Professor Alexander, of 
Princeton, presented to the American Phil- 
osophical Society an investigation of the 
orbit of the great comet of that year, accord- 
ing to which it appeared that the body must 
almost have touched the sun, this result be- 
ing explained on the hypothesis that the 
centre of gravity of the comet was not coin- 
cident with its centre of figure. In 1850 he 
published in the Astronomical Journal a mem- 



310 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



oir on the classification and special points 
of resemblance of certain periodic comets, 
and the probability of a common origin in 
the case of some of them. Three classes 
were distinguished. The possible rupture 
by the planet Mars of a large comet — that of 
131"» and 1316 — to furnish three of the third 
class, was suggested as an example. This 
hypothesis was very lightly treated by Hum- 
boldt in his Cosmos, but it has found unex- 
pected corroboration in observations of our 
own time. 

The orbit of the second comet of 1840 was 
computed by Professor Loomis, and the re- 
sults communicated to the American Philo- 
sophical Society, in an able paper, which 
was published in their eighth volume. 

In regard to cometary physics some very 
important speculations, or, perhaps, more 
properly discoveries, are due to American 
physicists and astronomers. The nature of 
the appendages called tails and the causes 
producing them have been in all ages sub- 
jects of perplexing discussion, and have 
given rise to a variety of hypotheses, many 
of which are more or less wild. This char- 
acter can not be attributed to the theory 
presented in 1859 by Professor W. A. Norton, 
of Yale College, in which the formation of 
comets' tails is assumed to be due to elec- 
trical repulsion, exerted both by the nucleus 
and by the sun, upon the attenuated matter 
sublimed from the mass by the solar heat. 
The particles, under the action of these 
forces, pass off in hyperbolic orbits. An ap- 
plication was made of this theory to the case 
of the remarkable comet of 1858, known as 
Douati's, by Professor Peirce. This comet 
had been continuously observed and mapped 
through all its varying and wonderful as- 
pects, during the entire five months of its 
visibility, by Mr. George P. Bond, whose mon- 
ograph on the subject, published in the An- 
nals of the Harvard Observatory, with its 
numerous and beautifully executed illustra- 
t ions, will always make it an authority of the 
highest character on the subject of comet- 
ary changes. Professor Peirce's analysis led 
to results entirely in harmony with the hy- 
pothesis, explaining not only the phenom- 
ena in general, but the special aspects, in- 
cluding the simultaneous exhibition of one 
or more rectilinear tails, along with the 
principal tail, which was curved in the form 



of a sabre. He applied a similar analysis 
to the great comet of 1843, with results 
equally satisfactory. Here also the investi- 
gation explained the existence of two tails, 
one of which did not reach the comet's head. 
The theory of electrical repulsion as applied 
to comets was proposed by some foreign as- 
tronomers, perhaps independently, at about 
the same time with the appearance of Pro- 
fessor Norton's memoir. It is frequently 
spoken of abroad as Professor Zollner's view. 
Auroras. — The aurora borealis has formed 
the subject of a pretty voluminous litera- 
ture, both at home and abroad, during the 
last half century. All the scientific jour- 
nals teem with articles on the subject, and 
the transactions of societies contain numer- 
ous elaborate memoirs relating to it. We 
can mention but a few of these publications, 
and those only briefly. In the first volume 
of Transactions of the Connecticut Acad- 
emy there appeared the results of seven- 
teen years' study of auroras by Edward C. 
Herrick, of New Haven, an observer unsur- 
passed for accuracy of observation and 
soundness of judgment. This paper will 
ever be a high authority in regard to the 
facts. Professor Loomis, of New Haven, ex- 
amined a few years since the question of 
the periodicity of the aurora, and of its rela- 
tion to the maxima and minima of solar dis- 
turbance as indicated by the spots, with 
reference to the possibility that both phe- 
nomena are dependent on a common cause. 
He found the periods nearly equal, but the 
auroral period less regular than the other, 
and the coincidences in general only ap- 
proximate. This question was at the same 
time occupying Professor Lovering, of Har- 
vard University, who has investigated it, so 
far as records go, to exhaustion. The tenth 
volume of the Transactions of the Ameri- 
can Academy contains a catalogue by him 
of every aurora to be found in accessible 
records from the year 502 B.C. down to a.d. 
1868. The total number is about 12,000; 
and this immense catalogue is carefully ana- 
lyzed with a view to determine the daily, 
the yearly, and the secular periodicity, if 
such exists. The results, which are not 
only tabulated but expressed in curves, do 
not exhibit all the regularity which might 
be anticipated, but they show, nevertheless, 
evidences of a periodicity, subject mani- 



METEOEIC ASTRONOMY. 



311 



festly to large disturbances from unknown 
causes. 

Meteoric Astronomy. — To American astron- 
omers is due the credit of having first cor- 
rectly interpreted the phenomena presented 
by the frequent intruders from the regions 
of space into our atmosphere called shoot- 
ing-stars. In regard to the nature of these 
bodies the most widely various hypotheses 
had from the earliest times been held by 
different speculators, none of them support- 
ed by proofs, or resting on any systematic 
observation. Some of the earliest conject- 
ures regarding them seem to have been 
soundest. Auaxagoras, whose general views 
of the structure of the universe were so 
much in advance of his time, supposed that 
there are non- luminous bodies revolving 
about the earth, from which meteors may 
proceed, though this idea is marred by the 
supposition that such bodies may have been 
thrown oft" from the earth itself by centrifu- 
gal force. Diogeues of Apollonia, whose own 
writings are not extant, but who wrote on 
cosmology, is said to have held that, besides 
the visible planets, there are other planets 
which are invisible. These sagacious con- 
jectures, however, were overborne by the 
later authority of Aristotle, who inculcated 
the doctrine that shooting-stars are terres- 
trial meteors originating in the atmosphere 
itself — a doctrine generally received as the 
most probable down to the present century. 

On the morning of November 13, 1833, 
there occurred one of the most wonderful 
displays of celestial pyrotechnics that was 
probably ever witnessed. As observed in 
the Eastern United States, it commenced 
about midnight and continued for some 
hours, increasing in magnificence until it 
was lost in the light of the rising sun. It 
was visible probably over the greater part 
of North America, and was actually observed 
at various points from the West India Isl- 
ands to Greenland, and westwardly to the 
one-hundredth degree of longitude. From 
the numerous descriptions of this sublime 
spectacle with which, immediately after its 
occurrence, tbe journals of the day were 
crowded, it seems to have presented the ap- 
pearance of a literal shower of fire, the me- 
teors falling on all sides in prodigious num- 
bers, and many of them exhibiting a splendor 
truly dazzling. An important fact in regard 



to these meteors noticed by many observers 
was the apparent divergence of their paths 
from a single radiant point. All accounts 
agreed in fixing this radiant in the constel- 
lation Leo, and in the statement that it con- 
tinued to maintain its position unchanged 
as the constellation advanced with the di- 
urnal motion of the heavens. This fact of- 
fered very conclusive evidence that the 
source of the meteors was foreign to the 
earth, and tbat their paths, though seeming- 
ly divergent, were actually parallel to each 
other and to a line drawn from the specta- 
tor to the radiant, the divergency being 
merely an effect of perspective. To Pro- 
fessor Denison Olmsted, of New Haven, be- 
longs the credit of having first pointed out 
the legitimate conclusions to be drawu from 
these phenomena, which he did in a paper 
imblished in the American Journal of Science 
in March, 1834. Having first demonstrated 
the cosmical origin of the meteors, Professor 
Olmsted proceeded, with the aid of such im- 
perfect data as at that time existed, includ- 
ing observations of a similar star-shower 
observed on the Eastern Continent in 1832, 
and of a much earlier one witnessed by 
Humboldt and Bonpland iu Cumana, South 
America, in 1799, to devise upon this basis 
a theory adequate to account for the facts. 
The conclusion reached by him was that 
the meteors must be portious of a nebulous 
body drawn into the earth's atmosphere at 
a point of near approach, and inflamed by 
the heat generated by the resistance of 
the atmosphere to their motion. Professor 
Olmsted did not explain the meaning at- 
tached by him to the term nebulous. If he 
meant by it a gas, or a finely comminuted 
and uniformly diffused solid matter, his the- 
ory is inadmissible. But if he meant a con- 
geries of loosely scattered discrete bodies, 
the phenomena are in harmony with his 
view; and to this extent the more recent 
and more exact investigations of Professor 
Newton, of Yale College, and Professor Schi- 
aparelli, of Milan, have confirmed his conclu- 
sions. But in assigning to the supposed 
nebulous body a period of 182 days, and in 
his speculations as to the density of the con- 
stituent parts of the nebula, he was less 
happy. He supposed the specific gravity to 
be very small, whereas the researches of 
Newton and others conclusively prove that 



312 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



these bodies must have the average density 
of our harder rocks; and the numerous spec- 
imens in cabinets of the fragmentary por- 
tions of them which have forced their way 
through the atmospheric shield by which 
our planet is protected against their de- 
structive impact are many of them largely 
or wholly composed of metal. The intense 
interest excited in all classes of persons by 
the meteoric display of 1833 turned the at- 
tention of a multitude of observers in this 
and other countries to the study of these 
phenomena — a study which was pursued 
both by the careful examination of records 
for the discovery of past examples of similar 
occurrences, and by the direct and continu- 
ous observation of the heavens themselves. 
The scientific journals of the period bear 
striking witness to the activity of these in- 
vestigators. One of the most successful 
among them was Mr. E. C. Herrick, of New 
Haven, at that time, or later, librarian of 
Yale College, who presently announced the 
discovery of three or four additional periods 
of periodical shooting -star abundance or 
star showers, viz., in January, August, April, 
and December. In regard to the August 
period, Quetelet, of Brussels, was afterward 
found to Lave anticipated him, but his dis- 
covery of the others was original. Since 
that time observation in many quarters has 
beeu so persistent and so fruitful of results 
as to justify the statement that there are 
not fewer than fifty different days in the 
year on which there is a tendency to a me- 
teoric display above the average. 

As from the examination of records, an- 
cient and modern, the number of observed 
returus of the November shower was in- 
creased, two very important deductions fol- 
lowed — first, the congeries of bodies fur- 
nishing the meteors must extend along its 
own orbit to a distance equal in longitude 
to about one-sixteenth or one-seventeenth 
of an entire circumference; and secondly, 
t licit- must be a continuous advance or pro- 
cession of the node, or intersection of the 
orbit with that of the earth, causing a re- 
tardation of the display by about a day at 
each return. The significaucy of the accu- 
mulated data was first shown by Professor 
Newton in 1864, who, from a comparison of 
observations covering a period of 931 years, 
determined the length of the cycle to be 



33.25 years, the annual mean procession of 
the node 1.711', the inclination of the orbit 
about 17°, and the length of the part of the 
cycle within which showers might be ex- 
pected 2.25 years. From these definitely 
ascertained results he deduced the higbly 
important conclusion that the periodic time 
of the group of bodies from which the me- 
teors proceed must be one of the five follow- 
ing, and no other, viz., 179.915 days, 185.413 
days, 354.586 days, 376.575 days, or 33.25 
years. It remained only, by applying the 
principles of physical astronomy, to com- 
pute the amount of annual procession of 
the node for each of these five orbits, and, 
by comparing the results with the observed 
procession, to determine which of the five 
orbits is the true one. This computation 
Professor Newton suggested as the experi- 
mentiim cruris ; but delayiug to apply it him- 
self, the honor was snatched from him by 
Mr. Adams, of Cambridge, England, who 
demonstrated that the only orbit of the five 
which fulfills the conditions is that which 
belongs to the period of 33.25 years. 

Professor Newton followed up his success 
with the November meteors by investiga- 
tions hardly less remarkable of the numer- 
ous irregularly occurring bodies of this class 
called sporadic. From a very large number 
of determinations of the altitudes of these 
bodies above the earth, he formed a table 
arranging the observations in groups be- 
tween limits of altitude regularly increas- 
ing, by which it appeared that few are seen 
at heights greater than 180 kilometers and 
few below 30 kilometers, the mean altitude 
on the whole being 95.55 kilometers. He 
then, by a course of very ingenious reason- 
ing and analysis, proceeded to demonstrate 
that the number of meteors which traverse 
some part of the earth's atmosphere daily, 
and are large enough to be visible to the 
naked eye (sun, moon, and clouds permit- 
ting), amounts to more than seven and a 
half millions. Including those fainter bod- 
ies of this class which escape the unaided 
eye, but may be detected by the telescope, 
this number must be greatly increased. 
Taking as a basis of calculation the num- 
ber of telescopic meteors observed by Win- 
necke between July 24 and August 3, 1854, 
with an ordinary comet-seeker of 53' aper- 
ture, the total number per day would seem 



COMETS AND METEOEOIDS. 



313 



to be more than 400,000,000 — a number which, 
higher optical power would, of course, cor- 
respondingly increase. The following are 
some of the more interesting conclusions 
reached in this investigation : 1. It is im- 
possible to suppose that these sporadic me- 
teors proceed from a group or riug at the 
same mean distance from the sun as the 
earth. 2. The mean velocity of these me- 
teoroids considerably exceeds that of the 
earth in its orbit, and hence the orbits are 
not approximately circular, but resemble 
the orbits of comets. 3. The number of 
meteoroids in the space through which the 
earth is moving is such that in each volume 
of the size of the earth there are as many 
as 13,000 small bodies, each one of which is 
capable of furnishing a shooting-star visi- 
ble, under favorable circumstances, to the 
naked eye. 

The further contributions to the theory 
of shooting-stars in which American astron- 
omers have participated are those which 
connect these bodies with the comets. Near 
the end of December, 1845, Mr. Herrick and 
Mr. Bradley, of New Haven, watching the 
Biela comet with the Clark telescope in the 
observatory of Yale College, observed a 
small companion comet beside the principal 
one. The same was seen two weeks later by 
Lieutenant Maury and Professor Hubbard 
at the Naval Observatory at Washington, 
and two days later than this was noticed in 
Europe. Professor Hubbard thereafter made 
this body a special study. At the time of 
the observations above mentioned the com- 
et was receding, and each day the pair pre- 
sented some novel phase. At one time an 
arch of light connected the two ; the prin- 
cipal one had two nuclei, and each had two 
tails. The smaller grew till it equaled the 
larger in brilliancy, then faded gradually, 
until, wiien the comet was last seen in 
March, it was no longer visible. In 1852 
the comet was very distant, but it was still 
double, the two companions being a million 
and a quarter miles apart. Since Septem- 
ber of that year this remarkable object has 
never been again seen. At the return in 
1859, it was in conjunction, or nearly so, with 
the sun, and was necessarily invisible. In 
1866 every thing favored its visibility, and 
hundreds of observers swept the heavens 
in search of it without success. Another 



return was due in the autumn of 1872. The 
body was not seen, but countless fragments 
broken from its mass came pouring into the 
earth's atmosphere on the night of the 27th 
of November, producing a star shower which 
for an hour or two almost rivaled in brill- 
iancy that of the 13th of the same month 
in 1833. A German astronomer, Professor 
Kliukerfues, at once conceived the notion 
that, if this were the comet's following, the 
main body might be seen in its retreat, 
though we had not seen it in its approach. 
But if so, it must be seen in the southern 
hemisphere. He telegraphed Mr. Pogson, at 
Madras : " Biela touched earth November 
27. Search near Theta Centauri." Mr. 
Pogson looked, and found the comet. The 
question is unsettled whether this was one 
of the two parts into which the comet was 
divided in 1845. Professor Newton thinks 
it was more probably a fragment thrown 
off long — perhaps centuries — before. 

The comet of 1862, III., was discovered on 
the 18th July, 1862, by Mr. H. P. Tuttle, of 
Cambridge, Massachusetts. It has been 
proved by Professor Schiaparelli that this 
comet is only a large member of the August 
stream of meteoroids. The comet of 1866, 1., 
discovered by Tempel, December 19, 1865, is 
shown also by Schiaparelli to be a member 
of the November stream. This comet Pro- 
fessor Newtou has identified with one which 
appeared in 1366. From the evidence fur- 
nished in these instances, and for other rea- 
sons, Professor Newton and Professor Weiss 
regard all these meteoroids as sufficiently 
proved to be made up of countless frag- 
ments detached from solid cometary masses, 
which comets until thus entirely broken up 
are only large members of the swarms with 
which they move in company. The cause 
of the fracture is supposed by Professor A. 
W.Wright, of Iowa, to be the intense heat 
of the sun as the body approaches its peri- 
helion. Professor Wright has recently ob- 
tained a gas from the Iowa meteorite which 
has the same spectrum as that of the com- 
ets. The comet's tail, therefore, is a gas- 
eous emanation not to be confounded with 
these meteoroid masses. 

Comets and meteoroids having thus been 
demonstrated to be generally identical, the 
question of the origin of all these bodies 
has become one of great interest. A theory 



314 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



on this subject, put forth in 1866 by Pro- 
fessor Schiaparelli, of Milan, assumed that 
matter is disseminated throughout space in 
all possible grades of division — embracing, 
in the first place, immense suns or stars of 
different magnitudes; secondly, groups of 
smaller or comparatively minute stars, such 
as those into which many of the nebulae are 
resolved; then bodies so small as to be in- 
visible except when they approach our sun, 
appearing then as comets ; and finally, " cos- 
mical clouds," made up of elements conform- 
able in weight to such as we may handle or 
transport upon the earth. The elements of 
these cosmical clouds he supposes to be so 
distant from each other that their mutual 
attraction is insufficient to counteract the 
effect of the sun's unequal action upon their 
different members, so that when drawn into 
our system from the regions of space, they 
lose wholly their globular form, and enter 
as streams, " which may possibly consume 
years, centuries, and even myriads of years 
in passing the perihelion, forming in space 
a river whose transverse dimensions are 
very small with respect to its length." This 
was the essential part of a theory which 
won for its author the Copley medal from 
the Royal Society — -a theory of which the 
only part not pure hypothesis is the demon- 
stration that the mean velocity of the me- 
teoroids exceeds that of the earth, and this 
fact had already been demonstrated by Pro- 
fessor Newton some years before. The rest, 
viz., all that relates to the different mechan- 
ical conditions of matter in space, is mere 
conjecture, and it is doubtful whether it 
continues still to be held by Professor Schi- 
aparelli himself. A more probable theory 
of the origin of comets is suggested by a 
very significant observation of the sun made 
by Professor Young, of Dartmouth College, 
on the 7th of September, 1871. An explo- 
sion was seen to take place at that time, by 
which a volume of exploded matter was 
driven to a height of 200,000 miles, with a 
velocity, between the altitudes of 100,000 
and 200,000 miles, of 166 miles per second. 
The visible clouds consisted of hydrogen. 
The resistance of the solar atmosphere pre- 
vented their complete separation from the 
sun, but should solid masses be projected 
with an equal velocity, they must be driven 
off never to return. Professor Young's ob- 



servation, therefore, suggests an origin of 
comets which harmonizes with the views 
of Weiss and Newton as to the source of 
meteoric streams ; and it is in further con- 
firmation of these views that hydrogen was 
found by Graham in abundance occluded in 
meteoric masses, and that the gas of the 
Iowa meteor gave to Professor Wright a 
cometary spectrum. 

METEOROLOGY. 

As early as 1743 Dr. Franklin made the 
important discovery that the atmospheric 
disturbances known as northeast storms on 
the Atlantic coast of North America begin 
actually in the southwest. The first fact 
which drew his attention to this seeming 
physical paradox was the occurrence of an 
eclipse of the moon on the 21st of October 
in the year just mentioned, which a north- 
easter prevented him from observing at 
Philadelphia, although it was seen to its 
close by his brother, at Boston, before the 
storm began. This storm did great dam- 
age along the coast, and, from the accounts 
subsequently obtained, it appeared that its 
effects were felt progressively from Caro- 
lina to Massachusetts. Other storms of 
the same kind were observed to advance 
in the same manner, whence Franklin in- 
ferred the existence of a law, and proceeded 
to inquire the cause. Thi3 he presumed to 
be the rarefaction of the air by the tropical 
heats of the far south, producing upward 
currents, with diminished pressure and a 
consequent flow of air toward the region of 
rarefaction. This inference of Dr. Franklin 
was the first step toward a proper under- 
standing of the law of storms in the tem- 
perate zones. 

The views then held by Dr. Franklin as to 
the mechanical action of the air in water- 
spouts, and as to the identity of the phenom- 
ena with tornadoes on the land, were very 
nearly those at present entertained. He 
failed, however, to recognize the important 
agency of the heat set free by condensation 
in the whirling column in maintaining and 
promoting the violence of the action, and he 
supposed that the height of the column of 
water raised was limited to that which the 
static pressure only of the atmosphere is 
capable of sustaining in a vacuum. For a 
long period after these observations, mete- 



METEOROLOGY. 



315 



orological science made very little advance 
either in this country or abroad. The year 
1814 was marked by the publication of the 
well-known essay on dew by William Charles 
Wells, which has become a classic in mete- 
orological science, aud has beeu pronounced 
by Sir JohnHerschel a model of experimental 
inquiry. Dr. Wells was a native of Charles- 
ton, South Carolina, and though his life was 
principally spent abroad, he belongs in a 
certain sense to the science of America. In 
the year 1827 Mr. William C. Redfield, of 
New York, published the first of a series of 
papers in which he announced and main- 
tained a theory of the storms of the Atlantic 
coast, or, as he called them, Atlantic hurri- 
canes, which gave rise to much controversy, 
but which has since in substance been re- 
ceived as a true statement of the law gov- 
erning the great progressive storms of the 
northern hemisphere. Mr. Redfield held — 
and aimed by a laborious comparison of ob- 
servations upon the winds, made at numer- 
ous and widely distant points on land and 
at sea during these storms, to prove — that 
the storm is a vast whirlwind, circular in 
figure, its motion of gyration being to an 
observer within it from right to left. While 
such was supposed to be the internal move- 
ment, the whole storm was shown to have a 
motion of translation along a curved path, 
convex toward the west, and having usual- 
ly its vertex in about latitude 37° or 38°, en- 
tering upon the continent between Georgia 
and Texas, and passing off on the coast of 
New England or of British America. The 
motion of progress is, therefore, the reverse 
of that of rotation, and the storm moves on 
its path in the same manner in which a 
wheel might be supposed to roll along a 
curved track. The birth-place of these 
storms was supposed by Mr. Redfield to be 
the West India Islands aud the Caribbean 
Sea, and, like Franklin, he supposed them 
to be caused by uprising currents produced 
by local tropical heats. As for their prog- 
ress, he supposed them to be borne along 
first by the trades, aud then by the coun- 
ter-trades, or prevailing west winds of the 
higher temperate zone. 

To the theory of Mr. Redfield was opposed 
a rival theory, identified with the name of its 
originator, Mr. James P. Espy, of Pennsyl- 
vania, who published in 1841 an essay en- 



titled, " The Philosophy of Storms." As to 
the origin of storms the two theories were 
in harmony ; but Mr. Espy supposed the air 
currents within the storm to follow the di- 
rection of radii of the circle from the cir- 
cumference to the centre, instead of being 
coincident in direction with the circumfer- 
ence itself. Long-continued and extended 
observation has shown that in this he was 
in error ; and it is, in fact, capable of a pri- 
ori demonstration that no two opposite at- 
mospheric currents, drawn toward the same 
point by a local diminished pressure, can 
approach in straight lines or meet each oth- 
er directly. From the configuration of the 
earth, and from its motion of rotation, of 
which the atmosphere partakes, such cur- 
rents must necessarily deviate toward the 
right, producing as a result a motion of gy- 
ration. It is evident, however, that Mr. 
Redfield was not wholly correct. The true 
motion of the winds within the storm is nei- 
ther rectilinear nor circular, but spiral, con- 
verging to the centre. Mr. Espy made an 
important contribution to the physics of 
storms in pointing out the source of the en- 
ergy which maintains them in action after 
the merely local cause which originally pro- 
duced them has ceased to have effect. This 
is the immense liberation of the heat of 
elasticity which takes place in consequence 
of the condensation of the aqueous vapor 
contained in the ascending air. As the air 
ascends, it expands from diminished press- 
ure ; expansion reduces its temperature be- 
low the dew-point ; condensation occurs, 
and the heat released causes further expan- 
sion. Thus the process continues till the 
moisture of the air is exhausted. The storm 
would soon cease if it were not in this man- 
ner continually fed by fresh supplies of un- 
condensed vapor drawn in with the air from 
surrounding regions. No such storm can 
endure upon deserts like those of Northern 
Africa. Mr. Espy's merits were acknowl- 
edged by the French Academy of Science in 
a formal report. Professor Loomis, of Yale 
College, has made many valuable contribu- 
tions to meteorological science in the study 
of particular storms, and more recently in a 
careful analysis of the weather maps which 
have for the last few years been issued daily 
from the Signal-office of the United States 
War Department. He has especially shown 



316 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



that while all our great storms are cyclonic, 
and to that extent conformable to Mr. Red- 
field's theory, they are not by any means, as 
Mr. Redfield had supposed, circular. They 
are rather irregularly elliptical, having their 
longer diameter generally north and south, 
inclining most frequently to the northeast 
and southwest direction, and they have oft- 
en large sinuosities of outline. 

The weather maps of the Signal -office 
just mentioned, and the system of widely 
extended telegraphic communication of ob- 
servations from all points of our national 
territory to a single central office at Wash- 
ington, by means of which the material is 
gathered for their preparation, have fur- 
nished admirable means for studying the 
laws which govern atmospheric changes on 
this continent. The system originated in 
1869, at Cincinnati, with Professor Cleve- 
land Abbe, who now conducts it, under Gen- 
eral Myer, chief signal officer. The tele- 
graphic prognostications of the weather 
daily transmitted for publication from the 
central office to all the chief cities of the 
Union have proved to be a very important 
public benefit. Something similar to this 
was attempted about twenty years ago by 
Mr. Espy, who then held an official appoint- 
ment as meteorologist under the govern- 
ment, but the means at his command were 
more limited, and his organization less com- 
plete. The Smithsonian Institution, ever 
since its establishment, has been active in 
promoting meteorological observation, and 
has maintained constant communication 
with several hundred observers in all parts 
of the United States. Previously to the war 
the secretary, Professor Henry, had planned 
and had partially put into operation a sys- 
tem of weather bulletins and storm warn- 
ings like the present, which, in consequence 
of the disturbed state of public affairs, was 
necessarily abandoned after the commence- 
ment of hostilities ; and for a number of 
years there was maintained at the institu- 
tion a large meteorological wall map of the 
continent exposed to public view, on which 
were daily exhibited emblems showing the 
aspect of the weather and the direction of 
the wind at each of a large number of points 
of observation distributed widely through- 
out the country, as communicated by tele- 
graph. 



SOUND. 
The science of acoustics has been great- 
ly advanced by the labors of the physicists 
and physiologists of the present century.' 
The mathematical theory of sound, the mode 
of its generation and propagation, the prin- 
ciples of music, and the laws of harmony 
had been well established by previous in- 
vestigators. But the experimental study 
of the particular phenomena of vibration, 
of the physiology of audition, of the ele- 
mentary tones which enter into the ordi- 
nary notes of music, of the physical causes 
of timbre or quality in sounds, and of what- 
ever else in acoustics is incapable of beiug 
deduced abstractly from definitions or first 
principles, had received comparatively lit- 
tle attention, or had been pursued with 
little success. The recent progress of ex- 
perimental acoustics has been wonderfully 
promoted by the ingenuity of the methods 
employed in the study of vibratiou ; some 
of them graphic, in which the vibrations 
record themselves, and others optical, in 
which they present a visible picture of their 
phases to the eye. The methods strictly 
acoustic have, moreover, been greatly im- 
proved in the hands of modern investiga- 
tors ; as in the case of the sirene of Cagniard 
de la Tour, which has been converted by 
Helmholtz into an instrument of largely in- 
creased capabilities. The vibrating lens of 
Lissajous, and the revolving mirrors and 
manometric flames of Kcenig, have furnished 
admirable means of illustrating the compo- 
sition and resolution of harmonic vibrations. 
Professor Tyndall's singing tubes and sen- 
sitive flames have shown in a striking man- 
ner the power of one vibration to excite 
or repress another. Recent comparatively 
simple forms of apparatus contrived by 
German experimenters have sbown that 
the velocity of propagation of sound in 
air or other gases can be determined in 
the space of a few feet with as much accu- 
racy as has beeu heretofore attained in the 
most elaborate and protracted observations 
made in the open air between signal sta- 
tions separated from each other by some 
miles. 

No single investigator has contributed 
more largely to the advancement of acous- 
tic science than Professor Helmholtz, of 
Berlin. In his great work on tone sensa- 



ACOUSTICS. 



317 



tion he has given the whole philosophy of 
composite waves and the theory of audition 
as founded on the capacity of the ear to re- 
solve these waves into their component ele- 
ments. He has shown that within a certain 
portion of the structure of the ear there are 
found a multitude of microscopic stretched 
cords, each of which is fitted to respond to 
a particular vihration, just as in a piano a 
siugle striug will vibrate when its own note 
is sounded, while all the rest remain silent. 
He has also contrived hearing tubes or 
shells, called by him resonators, which pos- 
sess this same property of separating an ele- 
mentary tone out of an ordinary composite 
musical note, and by means of a series of 
these he succeeds in discovering all the ele- 
ments of which such notes are composed. 
Every such elementary tone when separately 
heard has precisely the same quality, wheth- 
er derived from a reed, a stringed, or a wind 
instrument ; and thus it appears that the 
quality or timbre of a musical instrument is 
an effect of difference of composition, and 
not of difference of elementary sound. 

In the United States the number of inves- 
tigators who have occupied themselves with 
this interesting branch of science is small. 
Professor W. B. Rogers, now of Boston, gave 
some attention as early as 1850 to the curi- 
ous phenomena of singing tubes, that is, of 
tubes which utter a musical note on the in- 
troduction within them of a small gas flame. 
The vibration was imputed by Professor 
Rogers to a periodical explosive combustion 
of the gas, extinguishing the flame, which is 
immediately re-illuminated. For the pur- 
pose of demonstrating this latter fact, he 
employed as his gas jet a tube bent twice at 
right angles, which, by means of a pulley, 
he caused to revolve rapidly around its low- 
er limb. When this is revolved it produces 
an apparent ring of flame so long as the tube 
is silent ; but the moment the sound begins, 
the ring breaks into a crown of minute 
flames resembling a string of pearls. 

Professor Henry, in the discharge of his 
duties as chairman of the Light -house 
Board, has made many experiments on 
sound, with a view to improve the system 
of fog-signals. Some of the facts observed 
by him are interesting contributions to sci- 
ence. One of these is the remarkable prop- 
erty manifested by powerful sounds to prop- 



agate themselves laterally, or in directions 
divergent from that to which they are orig- 
inally confined. A steam-whistle, for exam- 
ple, blown at the focus of a large parabolic 
mirror will at moderate distances be better 
heard in front aud in the prolonged axis of 
the mirror than behind it ; but when the 
distance amounts to several miles, it is heard 
as well behind as before. In like manner, 
if a source of sound be near a building, an 
observer at a distance on the other side of 
the building may hear it distinctly, and yet 
may entirely lose it as he approaches the 
building. Another remarkable observation 
is as to the effect of winds on the audibility 
of sounds. At any considerable distance a 
wind blowing from the observer towai'd the 
source diminishes the loudness. This is ex- 
plained by the consideration that the lower 
strata of the air are retarded in their move- 
ments by the friction of the earth, and con- 
sequently that the fronts of the sound waves 
become inclined to the earth's surface. But 
as the direction of sound propagation is nor- 
mal to the wave fronts, it happens that a 
sound proceeding against the wind is de- 
flected upward so that its force passes above 
the heads of distant listeners. 

The only elaborate continuous series of 
investigations in acoustics which has been 
undertaken in this country has been con- 
ducted by Professor A. M. Mayer, of Hobo- 
ken. The processes of Professor Mayer, 
which are themselves extremely ingenious, 
have led to many results of interest and 
value. It is a proposition deducible from 
theory, and was so announced by Doppler 
more than thirty years ago, that the undu- 
lations generated by a vibratory body in 
motion will be effectively shortened in the 
direction toward which the body moves, and 
lengthened in the opposite direction. This 
is true as well in optics as in acoustics, and 
it is upon the assumption of its truth that 
Mr.Huggins has founded his inferences as to 
the absolute velocities with which the fixed 
stars are approaching the earth or receding 
from it. It has first been experimentally 
proved in the researches of Professor Mayer. 

The double sirene of Helmholtz affords a 
convenient means of studying the effect of 
partial or complete interference between 
sound waves which differ in phase at the 
point of origin, but there has been hitherto 



318 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



no instrumental means devised for deter- 
mining the amount of difference of phase 
■which exists between two waves originating 
in a common phase at the same origin, but 
brought by different and unequal paths to 
the point of interference. This want Pro- 
fessor Mayer has supplied, and in doing so 
has at the same time provided the most ex- 
act mode hitherto devised of measuring the 
■wave length corresponding to any pitch, and 
of ascertaining the velocity of sound in the 
air or in any gaseous medium. The deter- 
minations are made by means of the ser- 
rated flames in Kcenig's revolving mirrors, 
and their precision is secured by what is 
called a flame micrometer — as ingenious in 
conception as it is exact in its indications. 

The analysis of a composite note which 
Helmholtz accomplished by the use of his 
resonators, combined with Kcenig's mano- 
metric flames and revolving mirrors, has 
been effected by Professor Mayer directly, 
by connecting the arms of a number of steel 
tuning-forks by means of tightly stretched 
silk fibres with a membrane forming part 
of a reed pipe. On causing the pipe to 
speak, every fork whose tone forms a part 
of the note immediately sounds. 

Professor Mayer has also presented very 
strong evidence to confirm the opinion 
which many naturalists have entertained, 
that the antennas of insects constitute for 
them the organs of hearing, or organs, at 
least, through which they receive impres- 
sions for their guidance from the vibrations 
of the atmosphere ; he has investigated and 
delineated the curves which represent the 
resultant sound wave of a composite note, 
and has devised the means of optically rep- 
resenting the movements by which a single 
molecule of an elastic vibrating medium 
must be animated under the influence of 
such complex impulses. The most inter- 
esting of his contributions to this depart- 
ment of science is found in his determina- 
tion of the law which connects the pitch of 
a sound with the duration of its residual 
sensation, and in the deductions which flow 
from this law. It appears experimentally 
that if a sound of any pitch is suddenly 
arrested there follows a momentary disso- 
nance, but that if the interruption is reg- 
ular and periodic the dissonance diminishes 
with a diminution of the intervals till it 



finally disappears ; also, that a more rapid 
succession of the impulses is necessary to 
this disappearance in proportion as the pitch 
is higher. Professor Mayer finds that for a 
tone produced by forty vibrations a second, 
the residual sensation lasts one-eleventh of 
a second, while for one of 40,000 vibrations 
per second, it lasts only one-five-hundredth 
of a second. This difference of duration of 
the residual sensation is the reason that 
trills upon the upper notes are pleasing, 
while those on the lower are not. The ap- 
plication of these principles to the study 
of harmony and to the means of producing 
the most agreeable effects in musical com- 
position is important. 

LIGHT, HEAT, ETC. 

From the time of Newton to that of 
Young the science of optics made no ma- 
terial progress. The correction by Dollond, 
in 1758, of one of the few mistaken inferen- 
ces of Newton, that the dispersive powers of 
transparent bodies are not proportional to 
their mean refractive powers, however prac- 
tically important, was not a large contribu- 
tion to theory ; and Bradley's discovery of 
the aberration of light belongs rather to 
dynamics than to optics. It is, in fact, some- 
what surprising that this latter phenome- 
non had not been recognized in anticipation 
of observation as a physical necessity, since 
the progressive motion of light had been 
demonstrated by Roemer half a century be- 
fore. The first note of returning activity 
in the field of optical investigation was giv- 
en by Dr. Young in the memoirs which, in 
1800 and the two or three years following, 
he read before the Royal Society, reviving 
the hypothesis of Huyghens that light is 
propagated by undulations and not by the 
emission of material particles, and support- 
ing this view by evidences and reasonings 
so cogent as to advance it to the dignity of 
a theory. It is a remarkable fact, illustra- 
ting the tenacity with which even enlight- 
ened minds cling to opinions long received 
without question, that these able and unan- 
swerable papers failed to convince, or even, 
as is remarked by Principal Forbes, to se- 
cure a single adherent among the members 
of the learned body to which they were ad- 
dressed. The discovery by Malus in 1808 
of the polarization of light by reflection 



THE SPECTRUM. 



319 



awakened a new interest in optical ques- 
tions, and a large part of the history of this 
science during the first half of the nine- 
teenth century is occupied with the devel- 
opment of the consequences of this discov- 
ery by Fresnel, Arago, Brewster, Seebeck, 
and others. Important contributions to the 
mathematical theory, left in some respects 
incomplete by Fresnel, were made by Cau- 
chy, Macculagh, and Sir William Rowan 
Hamilton. No part of this belongs to Amer- 
ican science. 

Spectrum. — In 1802 Dr. Wollaston, of Lon- 
don, in observing through a prism the image 
of an elongated and very narrow aperture, 
perceived it to be intersected by well-defined 
straight lines perpendicular to its length — 
lines which Young seems to have regarded 
at first as boundaries between the several 
elementary colors of the spectrum. Dr. 
Brewster subsequently observed that cer- 
tain bodies, solid, liquid, and gaseous, have 
the power of producing not lines only, but 
broad bands in the spectral image of the 
light transmitted through them. But the 
most remarkable discovery in this branch 
of investigation was made by Fraunhofer 
in 1814, who, employing a telescope to aid 
the observation, detected and was able to 
count nearly six hundred lines like those 
seeu by Wollaston, fixed in position — a num- 
ber which Brewster subsequently increased 
to two thousand, and which later observa- 
tions have shown to be practically unlimit- 
ed. The earliest investigations of this cu- 
rious, but, as it has since appeared, highly 
important class of phenomena, undertaken 
in the United States, were made by Dr. John 
William Draper, of New York, a man whose 
name occupies a very conspicuous place in 
the world as well of letters as of science. 
Dr. Draper's labors in this department were 
spread over so large a field that it would be 
quite impracticable to do them justice in 
the limited space at our command. They 
embraced at once the physical, chemical, 
and thermal properties of light, and the re- 
lations of this principle to the organic world 
and the physiology of vision. He was the 
first to apply the method of photography to 
the study of the Fraunhofer lines. A mem- 
oir published by him in 1843 describes 
many new lines in the ultra-red and ultra- 
violet. The great bands in the ultra-red 



were first detected by him. Some of these 
were subsequently rediscovered by the aid 
of the thermo-multiplier. In 1844 he pho- 
tographed the diffraction spectrum formed 
by a Gitter-platte, or ruled grating, and pub- 
lished a memoir showing the singular ad- 
vantages which that spectrum possesses 
over the prismatic in investigations on ra- 
diation. Since the science of spectroscopy 
(a science of which the foundations were laid 
in Dr. Draper's early researches) has attain- 
ed so high an importance in connection with 
investigations both of celestial and terres- 
trial chemistry, the spectrum has been pho- 
tographed upon a much larger scale than 
was attempted by Dr. Draper. 

The most admirable photograph of this 
kind, so far as the visible spectrum is con- 
cerned, was obtained by Mr. Lewis M. Ruth- 
erfurd, of New York, in 1866. It was en- 
larged from an original taken with prisms 
constructed of plate-glass, hollow, and fill- 
ed with bisulphide of carbon — a plau first 
adopted by Professor O. N. Rood, in 1862. 
To a very powerful train of such prisms, 
six in number, made effectively twelve by 
means of a repeating prism, Mr. Rutherfurd 
subsequently applied a system of mechan- 
ical or automatic adjustment for varying 
the angular position without deranging the 
regularity of the train, which was the first 
contrivance of the kind ever invented. Of 
the map, eighty-two inches in length, and 
embracing more than 2500 sharply defined 
lines, Mr. Lockyer, the celebrated spectro- 
scopist of London, remarked recently in a 
public lecture, it was a thing so admirable 
that he could not look at it without a feel- 
ing of the intensest envy. Still more re- 
cently (1873), Dr. Henry Draper, son of Dr. 
J. W. Draper, has produced a photograph of 
the ultra-violet rays of the diffraction spec- 
trum which far exceeds in distinctness any 
thing previously attempted in this difficult 
spectral region. The gitter from which it 
was taken was ruled by Mr. Rutherfurd, 
who had long been engaged in the attempt 
to perfect plates suitable for this purpose. 
The earliest gitters were prepared by Fraun- 
hofer, and were ruled through leaf metal or 
thin coatings of grease on glass. He sub- 
sequently ruled with a diamond point on 
the glass itself; but none of his rulings 
were closer than about 8000 lines to the 



320 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



inch, and none of over 3500 were regular 
enough to be serviceable. For the last 
twenty or thirty years the plates most in 
use by investigators have been furnished 
by Mr. F. A. Nobert, of Barth, in Pomeranian 
Prussia, who has carried his rulings to a 
degree of fineness far beyond that at which 
spectra cease altogether to be produced, the 
object being to provide tests for the resolv- 
ing power of microscopes. Admirable as 
these productions certainly are, they are de- 
ficient in uniformity, which is the quality of 
most essential importance in the gratings 
required for the study of diffraction spec- 
tra. Mr. Rutherfurd's finer gratings have 
nearly 18,000 lines to the inch, and their 
uniformity, as tested by the sharpness of 
their definition of the spectral lines, is all 
but perfect. The delicacy of this ruling 
operation may be judged by the fact that 
when the machine which draws the lines 
is operated by hand, although not touched 
but only moved by a cord attached, the rul- 
ing is liable to be made uneven by the ef- 
fect of expansion from the radiant heat 
of the person. In consequence of this, 
Mr. Rutherfurd resorted to the expedient 
of driving the machine by a miniature 
turbine wheel, with very satisfactory re- 
sults. 

The memoir of Dr. Henry Draper accom- 
panying the photograph above mentioned 
was read before the French Academy of 
Sciences, and published in their Comptea 
Eenclus. It has also been printed in full in 
the principal journals devoted to physical 
science in France, England, Italy, and Ger- 
many, and the discussion of the photograph 
has settled the wave lengths of all the ultra- 
violet rays, and has finally corrected the er- 
rors of previous observers. 

The first suggestion of the relation be- 
tween the spectra of incandescent or incan- 
descing bodies and their physical condition 
or chemical composition was made by Dr. 
J. W. Draper, in an important memoir " On 
the Production of Light and Heat," publish- 
ed in 1847. This, among other things, point- 
ed out the means of determining the solid 
or gaseous condition of the sun, the stars, 
and the nebulae. In it the author demon- 
strated experimentally that all solid sub- 
stances, and probably all liquids, become in- 
candescent at the same temperature ; that 



the temperature of red heat is about 977° F. ; 
that the spectrum of an incandescent solid 
is continuous, containing neither bright nor 
dark fixed lines ; that from common tem- 
peratures up to 977° F. the rays emitted by 
a solid produce no effect on vision, but that 
at that temperature they impress the eye 
with the sensation of red ; that the heat 
of the incandescing body being made con- 
tinuously to rise, other rays are added, in- 
creasing in refrangibility with increase of 
temperature ; and that while the addition 
of rays so much the more refrangible as the 
temperature is higher is going on, there is 
an augmentation of the intensity of those 
already existing. In the following year, in 
a memoir on the production of light by 
chemical action, Dr. Draper gave the spec- 
trum analysis of many different flames, and 
devised the arrangements of charts of their 
fixed lines in the manner now universally 
employed. The former of these memoirs 
had a circulation in American and foreign 
journals proportionate to its importance. 
An analysis of it in Italian was read in July, 
1847, by Melloni, before the Royal Academy 
of Naples, and this was afterward transla- 
ted into French and English. Yet, notwith- 
standing the publicity thus given to these 
discoveries, the same facts were thirteen 
years later published by Professor Kirch- 
hoff, under the guise of mathematical de- 
ductions, with so slight a reference to the 
original discoverer that he secured substan- 
tially the entire credit of them himself; and 
in a historical sketch of spectrum analy- 
sis subsequently published, he omitted the 
name of Dr. Draper altogether. This is the 
more remarkable, as the historical sketch 
here referred to was professedly prepared 
because the writer had become aware of 
the existence "of some publications on the 
subject which he had not before known, 
and had found that other publications 
which had appeared to him to possess no 
special interest" were not similarly regard- 
ed by all. The object, therefore, of this 
sequel was " to complete the historical sur- 
vey." It is entirely occupied, nevertheless, 
with an argument to disprove that any ob- 
server had contributed any thing to " the 
solution of the proposed question whether 
the bright lines of a glowing gas are sole- 
ly dependent on its chemical constituents" 



PHOTOGRAPHY. 



321 



until 1861, when it was solved by Bun sen 
and himself — excepting only Swan, who in 
1857 identified the sodium line, although 
"he did not answer the question positively, 
or in its most general form." The writer 
considers and passes judgment on the chums 
of Herschel, Talbot, W. A. Miller, Wheat- 
stone, Masson, Angstrom, Van der Willigen, 
and Pliicker, all of whom had examined the 
well-known bright lines in the spectra of 
flames or of the electric spark, and had 
made suggestions indicating that this ques- 
tion had been present to their minds ; but 
remarkably omits from the enumeration the 
name of the only observer whose publica- 
tions were most directly suggestive of such 
a course of investigation as that which he 
himself subsequently pursued. In 1858, 
three years before the announcement of the 
results obtained by Bunsen and Kirchhoff, 
a memoir appeared by Dr. Draper on the 
nature of flame and the condition of the 
sun's surface, which was the precursor of 
the numerous investigations out of which 
has grown the imposing science of celestial 
chemistry. 

The spectra of the stars were earliest 
studied by Mr. Rutkerfurd, who published 
in 1863 a comparative map or diagram giv- 
ing the spectra of 'seventeen different stars 
compared with those of the sun, the moon, 
and the planets Mars and Jupiter. The 
star spectra were arranged by him in three 
classes, to some extent corresponding to 
those since made by Secchi. In 1861 Pro- 
fessor Kirchhoff made public his well-known 
map of the solar spectrum, in which the 
very numerous lines given are determined 
in place by a millimetric scale. To remove 
the uncertainties attendant on the use of 
such a system, Dr. Wolcott Gibbs, of Har- 
vard University, proposed, and to a certain 
extent constructed, in 1866, a normal map 
of the spectrum founded on wave lengths. 
His map embraced 187 lines lying between 
C and G of Fraunhofer. In 1871 a prelim- 
inary map or catalogue of the spectral lines 
of the solar chromosphere was published in 
the Philosophical Magazine, of London, by 
Professor C. A. Young, of Dartmouth College, 
which was afterward republished by Schel- 
len in his large work on the spectroscope. 
This embraced 103 lines, identifying such as 
had been observed before, and giving the 
21 



names of former observers. In the follow- 
ing year this number was increased by Pro- 
fessor Young to 273. The most important 
contribution to stellar spectroscopy yet 
made is a photograph of the spectrum of 
Alpha Lyrse taken by Dr. Henry Draper 
with his great speculum of twenty-eight 
inches aperture, showing in the invisible 
region four great groups of lines never be- 
fore seen. This interesting result has been 
attained only after seventeen years of per- 
severing effort, and is the fruit of probably 
the most difficult and costly experiment in 
celestial chemistry ever made. 

The conclusion as to the chemical consti- 
tution of the heavenly bodies to which the 
study of their spectra has led, is that the 
same elements are found in them as in the 
earth, and only the same, with the single ex- 
ception of a supposed element in the sun, 
called for the present, helium. But it ap- 
pears that the temperatures of the different 
bodies must be materially different ; and this 
difference is without doubt the occasion of 
the varieties of their spectral aspects, and 
of their very observable differences of color 
to the eye. 

In regard to the distribution of heat in 
the spectrum, an important discovery was 
made by Dr. Draper so recently as 1872. 
He has shown that the observed decrease 
of the intensity of heat from the more to the 
less refrangible region is due not to any in- 
herent quality of the rays, but solely to the 
action of the prism itself, which compresses 
the less refrangible region and dilates the 
more refrangible. 

Photography. — The sensibility of many ^ 
chemical compounds to the action of light 
was very early observed. Attempts were 
made by Sir Humphry Davy and others 
early in this century to take advantage of 
this fact for the purpose of producing copies 
of prints, leaves, etc., by pressing them un- 
der glass against sheets of paper which had 
been impregnated with silver salts, and ex- 
posing them in the sunlight. Imperfect 
copies were obtained, but they were eva- 
nescent, no successful process having been 
discovered for removing the unchanged salt 
from the paper. They were counterparts of 
the originals, but presented, of course, the 
lights and shades reversed. For a number 
of years, beginning in about 1830, Mr. Ni- 



322 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



cephore Niepce and Mr. Daguerre in France, 
and Mr. Fox Talbot in England, occupied 
themselves in persevering endeavors to dis- 
cover some mode by which the fleeting im- 
ages might be fixed, and to increase the sen- 
sitiveness of the chemically prepared surface 
employed to receive the impression. These 
efforts were at length crowned with success. 
In 1839 Mr. Daguerre made public the beauti- 
ful process which bears his name, and this 
was immediately followed by the announce- 
ment of the very different one which Mr. 
Talbot had been engaged in perfecting, and 
which he was thus constrained somewhat 
prematurely to disclose. The production of 
these light-pictures was attributed to the 
action of a class of rays present in the sun- 
light, but non-luminous, called, for want of 
a better name, the chemical rays. For this 
term Dr. Draper proposed to substitute the 
name tithonic, from a fancied analogy with 
the fable of Tithonus,the favorite of Aurora; 
and somewhat later Sir John Herschel sug- 
gested the term actinic — a term which, in 
spite of its etymological vagueness, has since 
prevailed. In regard to this class of rays, the 
researches of Dr. Draper, protracted through 
a period of ten or fifteen years, commencing 
about 1835, were more fertile of results than 
those of any contemporary investigator. 
Though embracing the class of phenomena 
on which the art of photography has been 
founded, their scope was in the largest de- 
gree comprehensive. They included, among 
other things, experiments on the absorption 
of the chemical rays by solid and liquid me- 
dia, the decomposition of carbonic acid by 
light, the interference of chemical rays, the 
crystallization of substances in the rays of 
light, the supposed magnetizing properties 
of the solar rays, which he found not to ex- 
ist, and the effects of light upon vegeta- 
tion. The memoirs published by him on 
these subjects in foreign and American jour- 
nals amounted to nearly forty. Many of 
these" were collected in 1844 in a large quar- 
to volume, entitled, A Treatise on the Forces 
which produce the Organization of Plan ts. Par- 
ticularly noticeable among these are a mem- 
oir explanatory of the mechanical cause of 
the flow of sap in plants, which is ascribed 
to the carbonization of water on the leaves 
by the light of the sun ; and another, dem- 
onstrating that it is the yellow ray which 



produces the reduction of carbonic acid in 
plants, and not the violet, as had been pre- 
viously supposed. The first photographic 
portraits of the human countenance were 
taken by Dr. Draper soon after the an- 
nouncement of Daguerre's discovery, and at 
a time when such a thing had been pro- 
nounced impracticable by so high an au- 
thority as Sir David Brewster. He taught 
the art to Professor Morse, by whom it was 
long successfully practiced, and who pos- 
sessed exclusively the secret until it was at 
length made public by the originator in the 
London and .Edinburgh Philosophical Maga- 
zine. This consisted essentially in quick- 
ening the sensitiveness of the Daguerrean 
plates by brief exposure to the vapor of 
bromine. By this treatment they became 
so extremely sensitive as to receive an im- 
pression instantaneously in the open air, 
and in the light of an ordinary apartment 
in a very few seconds. About the same 
time, and while the method of Dr. Draper 
was still undisclosed, a similar result was 
attained by the writer of this article by 
the use of chlorine. Photographs of the 
moon were taken by Dr. Draper as early as 
1840, at a time when the moon's rays were 
supposed to possess no actinic power, and 
when, in fact, bright objects strongly illu- 
minated by the intensest light of the full 
moon failed, after hours of exposure, to pro- 
duce any trace of an impression on the plates 
of Daguerre. These photographs showed 
very well the light and shade characteris- 
tic of the different regions of the satellite, 
though by no means comparable to the mag- 
nificent photographs since taken by Dr. Hen- 
ry Draper and by Mr. Rutherfurd. 

The useful applications of the photo- 
graphic art are very numerous. In por- 
traiture it has created a special industry, 
large and lucrative, and of world-wide pop- 
ularity. In mechanical engineering and in 
every branch of constructive art it furnish- 
es the means of obtaining designs of the 
most complicated machinery or structures 
without the expenditure of time and labor 
necessary for the execution of drawings. 
It provides a perfect means of cultivating 
the popular taste or of instructing the pop- 
ular intelligence by bringing faithful rep- 
resentations of the choicest works of art, or 
of the most interesting scenes of nature and 



THE MICROSCOPE. 



323 



of human life, within the reach of every 
one. Aided by the ingenious invention of 
Professor Wheatstone, the stereoscope, it 
actually seems to reproduce before us the 
objects which it represents, with all the as- 
pect of reality. In its later degrees of per- 
fection it has made it possible to prepare 
plates from which prints in ink can be di- 
rectly taken ; and as an aid to the litho- 
graphic art it has substituted a direct im- 
pression on the stone for the patient labor 
of the engraver or the draughtsman. In the 
magnetic observatories established by the 
British and other European governments, it 
traces the record of the daily and hourly 
fluctuations of the magnetic elements ; and 
it has in some instances been employed to 
record in like manner the indications of the 
barometer and the thermometer. Its high- 
est applications are undoubtedly to astron- 
omy, to uranographical measurements ac- 
cording to the method of Mr. Rutherfurd, 
to the study of the solar and stellar spectra 
as practiced by Mr. Rutherfurd and Dr. H. 
Draper, to that of the sun spots so per- 
severingly pursued by De la Rue, Loewy, 
and Carringtou, and to fixing the phases 
of solar eclipses, and of still more rare 
phenomena, like the transit of Venus. 

Production of Cold. — One of the most im- 
portant applications of the principles of 
physics to a practical purpose is to be 
found in the various forms of apparatus at 
present in use for the artificial production 
of cold. All of these owe their efficacy to 
the absorption of heat which takes place in 
the vaporization of highly volatile liquids ; 
and the discovery that this principle can be 
practically and economically utilized is due 
to our countryman, Professor A. C. Twining, 
of New Haven, by whom the first apparatus 
for the purpose on a working scale ever c 'ii- 
structed was put into operation in 1850, and 
was made the subject of a patent in this 
country and in England. Professor Twin- 
ing made use of common sulphuric ether as 
the liquid to be vaporized. Subsequently 
Mr. Tellier, an English inventor, substitu- 
ted for this, methylic ether, which has the 
advantage of being greatly more volatile ; 
and Mr. Carre", of Paris, employed liquefied 
ammoniacal gas, which possesses the same 
advantage in a still higher degree. An 
important industry has grown out of this 



discovery, which is every year enlarging the 
magnitude of its operations. 

The Microscope. — The discovery made in 
1829 by Mr. J. J. Lister, of London, that ev- 
ery achromatic combination of lenses has 
two aplanatic foci, and that by the combi- 
nation of two achromatics the spherical 
aberration of oblique pencils can be effect- 
ually suppressed, formed an epoch in the 
history of this instrument from which dates 
an almost miraculously rapid advance to- 
ward perfection. Results toward which 
Chevallier and others had been blindly feel- 
ing their way without ever satisfactorily 
reaching them were now made dependent 
upon well-ascertained principles ; and the 
question who should produce the best mi- 
croscope became a question of relative in- 
genuity in the application of theory no less 
than of practical skill in producing the 
curves which theory dictated. In 1846 Mr. 
Charles S. Spencer, a young, self-taught, and 
previously unknown optician living in the 
interior of the State of New York, submitted 
to the microscopists of the country micro- 
scopic objectives exhibiting a sharpness of 
definition and power of resolution which 
excited the greatest surprise, and entitled 
them to be esteemed, for the time at least, 
as superior to any other known in the 
world. The great multiplication of micro- 
scopic observers produced by the wonderful 
improvement of the instrument, and the 
great increase in the demand for objectives 
consequent upon the multiplication of ob- 
servers, soon, however, produced the natu- 
ral effect of rivalry among opticians, and 
foreign objectives appeared which justly 
challenged comparison with those of Mr. 
Spencer. In the subsequent progress of 
improvement the artisans of England, 
France, Germany, and the United States 
have maintained a pretty equal strife. Mr. 
Spencer still sustains the high reputation 
which he so early established ; and upon the 
same plane with him may be placed Mr. R. 
B. Tolles, of Boston, and Mr. William Wales, 
of Fort Edward, New Jersey. Of the natu- 
ralists among us who have devoted them- 
selves to the use of the microscope, none 
have done more honor to the science of 
our country than the late Professor Bailey, 
of West Point, whose contributions to the 
knowledge of the diatomacepe are distribu- 



324 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



ted through the journals and Transactions, 
and Professor H. L. Smith, of Hobart Col- 
lege, one of the highest living authorities 
upon this order of the algae, who has now in 
the hands of the Smithsonian Institution, 
awaiting publication, a systematic and com- 
prehensive monograph on the subject, found- 
ed on the studies and observations of twen- 
ty years, and illustrated with numerous 
original drawings from nature. 

ELECTRICITY, MAGNETISM, ETC. 

Down to the end of the eighteenth cen- 
tury the science of electricity existed only 
in a very elementary condition. Its phe- 
nomena, so far as they were known, belonged 
to static electricity only, and were referred 
to the agency of a subtle fluid or fluids pres- 
ent every where, but becoming manifest only 
when in a state of disturbed equilibrium. 
The hypothesis of a single electrical fluid is 
usually ascribed to Franklin, and passes by 
his name, though Leslie claims that it had 
been earlier suggested by Watson, of Lon- 
don. The opposing hypothesis of Dufay 
presumed the existence of two fluids neu- 
tralizing each other in the ordinary condi- 
tion of bodies by their union, and exhibiting 
attractions and repulsions when separated. 
The Franklinian hypothesis is liable to the 
objection that it necessitates the supposi- 
tion that material bodies deprived of elec- 
tricity are mutually repellent. But neither 
is any longer entertained. Franklin dem- 
onstrated the identity of lightning with the 
ordinary electric spark as early as 1752. It 
is commonly believed that the first suspi- 
cion of this identity originated with him ; 
but it had already been suggested by Nollet 
in 1746, who compared a thunder-cloud to 
the prime conductor of an electrical ma- 
chine (it resembles more nearly one coating 
of a Leyden-jar), and had been urged in a 
plausible course of reasoning by Winkler. 
Franklin's merit was that he suggested the 
means of setting the question forever at 
rest by actually drawing electricity out of 
the clouds. It is a curious fact that he was 
not the first to try his own experiment. The 
plan he had publicly proposed was to erect 
on some eminence a lofty insulated iron rod 
tapering to a point ; and this plan was fol- 
lowed by Dalibard, who drew sparks from 
such a rod erected near Paris, and even 



charged from it a Leyden-jar, as early as the 
10th of May, 1752. The famous kite experi- 
ment of Franklin was performed more than 
a month later, on the 15th of June ; but in 
those days, in which ocean cables and steam- 
ships were equally unknown, he was, of 
course, ignorant of Dalibard's previous suc- 
cess. It is upon this experiment that the 
immense reputation of Franklin as a man of 
science mainly rests. Considering the sim- 
plicity of the conception and the still great- 
er simplicity of the apparatus by which it 
was realized, we can not at this distance of 
time but be astonished at the profound im- 
pression it produced upon the world. Such 
was his popularity in France that, when he 
appeared as the representative of the Ameri- 
can colonies at the court of Louis XVI., the 
sale of his portrait made the fortune of the 
engraver ; and beneath this portrait was in- 
scribed, by the minister of a monarch him- 
self a few years later dethroned and exe- 
cuted as a tyrant, the famous legend, 

" Eripuit coelo f ulmen, sceptrumque tyraunis." 

Not long after this, moreover, the celebra- 
ted Erasmus Darwin, writing to compliment 
Franklin on having united philosophy to 
modern science, directed his letter merely to 
" Dr. Franklin, America," adding that he was 
almost disposed to write "Dr. Franklin, The 
World," there being but one Franklin, and 
that Franklin being known of all men. Aft- 
er making all allowance for the weight of 
Franklin's political position and the sound 
practical sense displayed in his writings on 
subjects of popular interest, there remains 
no doubt that his singular celebrity was 
due mainly, after all, to the association of 
his name with the lightning. The great 
discovery of Volta, just at the close of the 
century, originated a new and prolific branch 
of electrical science, not at first recognized 
as such. In the infancy of the investiga- 
tion which this discovery opened, it was a 
first necessity of progress to improve the 
means by which the electric current is gen- 
erated. For the inconvenient pile of the 
discoverer, trough batteries with immovable 
plates were soon introduced in England, and 
it was by means of such that Sir Humphry 
Davy made many of his very numerous and 
celebrated electro-chemical discoveries. Dr. 
Wollaston greatly improved these batteries 



ELECTRICITY. 



325 



by giving them a construction which caused 
both sides of the zincs to be effective, and 
permitted the plates to be removed from the 
troughs. But all these forms of apparatus 
were attended with the serious disadvantage 
that their power when in action rapidly de- 
clined, in consequence of the formation upon 
the negatives of a coating of minute bub- 
bles of hydrogen gas. This difficulty was 
first effectually overcome by Dr. Eobert 
Hare, of Philadelphia, who in 1820 intro- 
duced the form of voltaic battery which, 
from the intensity of its efiects, he called 
the deflagrator. The deflagrator was made 
very compact by forming the metals into 
coils, their opposed surfaces being very near 
to each other, but separated by insulating 
wedges ; but its important characteristic 
consisted of a mechanism by which the en- 
tire series of elements could be instantane- 
ously immersed in the liquid or lifted out. 
For experiments of brief duration, therefore, 
the battery was always ready to act with its 
full power. A similar device occurred later 
to Faraday, but though it was original with 
him, he very honorably admitted that on ex- 
amination he found this new battery to be 
" in all essential respects the same as that 
invented and described by Dr. Hare." Be- 
sides the deflagrator, Dr. Hare constructed 
auotber form of voltaic apparatus, designed 
with low intensity of electricity to generate 
an enormous volume of heat. This, which he 
called the calorimotor, was formed by com- 
bining many very large plates of zinc and 
copper into two series, and immersing them 
at once into a tank of dilute acid. By means 
of it large rods of iron or platinum are ig- 
nited and fused in a few seconds, and its 
magnetic effects are equally surprising ; yet 
it is hardly capable of producing the faintest 
spark between carbon electrodes. Dr. Ha^-e 
was an extremely voluminous writer on sub- 
jects connected with voltaic electricity and 
chemistry. Nearly one hundred and fifty 
articles from his pen may be found in the 
Journal of Science alone. In invention he 
was wonderfully fertile, and in the variety 
of ingenious contrivances devised and con- 
structed by him in aid of investigation or 
for purposes of illustration, he deserves to 
be ranked with men like Hooke, Wollaston, 
and Wheatstone. 

The constant battery, the next improve- 



ment in voltaic electro-motive apparatus, 
was produced by Daniell in 1836. It is a 
battery of four elements, two metallic and 
two liquid, the liquids being separated by 
a porous partition. In this arrangement 
the nascent hydrogen set free on the zinc 
side, combining with the oxygen of the 
metallic base of the solution on the copper 
side, no longer appears in the gaseous form, 
and the obstruction it had occasioned to 
circulation is thus suppressed. Daniell, 
nevertheless, was not the first to suggest a 
battery of four elements. The credit of 
this suggestion is due to Dr. John W. Dra- 
per, of New York, who, as early as 1834, de- 
scribed such a battery in the Journal of the 
Franklin Institute. 

The relation of electricity to magnetism 
was a discovery accidentally made by Oer- 
sted, of Copenhagen, in 1819. He noticed 
that if a wire conveying a voltaic current 
be brought near a suspended magnetic nee- 
dle, the needle will be deflected from its 
normal position. This remarkable discov- 
ery was followed by one no less remark- 
able, made simultaneously by Arago and 
Davy, that the conducting wire itself, what- 
ever may be the material it is composed of, 
is capable, while conveying the voltaic cur- 
rent, of attracting soft iron. Ampere next 
discovered that two wires conveying elec- 
tric currents attract each other if the cur- 
rents are in the same direction, and repel 
if the directions are opposite. Upon this 
he founded his celebrated theory which 
made magnetism only one of the forms of 
manifestation of electrical force. This the- 
ory suggested to Arago the idea that a steel 
needle might possibly be magnetized by 
subjecting it to the action of an electric 
current passing spirally round it. He test- 
ed the truth of this conjecture, and his ex- 
periment was a success. A repetition of 
this experiment in modified form by Stur- 
geon, of Woolwich, England, in 1825, drew 
after it important consequences. Bending 
a piece of stout iron wire into the form of 
a horseshoe, and coating it with varnish to 
secure insulation, he wound round this a 
copper wire, which ho introduced into the 
battery circuit. The iron wire thus treat- 
ed became temporarily a feeble horseshoe 
magnet, capable of sustaining a weight of 
two or three pounds. At this stage of the 



326 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



investigation the subject attracted the at- 
tention of Professor Joseph Henry, of Al- 
bany, New York, and the next step in the 
progress of this history — a very large one 
— was taken by him. Considering that the 
intensity of the effect must be proportion- 
ed to the closeness of the coil, and that 
with a naked conductor the spirals could 
not permissibly be brought into contact, it 
occurred to him to insulate the conducting 
wire itself, which he did by winding it with 
silk. This expedient enabled him not only 
to envelop the iron closely in the first in- 
stance, but also to wind several successive 
coils over each other. The result was to 
produce an electro-magnet in the proper 
sense of the word — an instrument not lim- 
ited in its use to the purposes of lecture- 
room illustration, but capable of important 
and largely varied practical applications. 
Some of the magnets constructed by Pro- 
fessor Henry sustained weights of between 
one and two tons. 

In pursuing his investigations on this 
subject, Professor Henry ascertained a num- 
ber of important facts concerning the laws 
of development of magnetism in soft iron. 
Having surrounded a given bar with a num- 
ber of short helices abutting end to end, he 
tried the effect of first uniting the similar 
ends of these so as to make one short com- 
pound conductor, and of afterward uniting 
their dissimilar ends so as to make a siugle 
continuous conductor of them all. With a 
battery of a few elements, the first ar- 
' raugement proved to be most effective, but 
with one of many, the second was superior. 
Hence the distinction introduced by him be- 
tween quantity and intensity magnets. 

The possible practical applications of 
the electro-magnet were not overlooked by 
Professor Heury, though he contented him- 
self with pointing them out without pursu- 
ing them. The practicability of an electric 
telegraph was illustrated by him in an ap- 
paratus fitted up in 1831 in the Albany 
Academy, by which an electric current 
transmitted through a circuit of more than 
a mile was made to ring a bell. The inven- 
tion of the first recording magnetic tele- 
graph — that is, of the instrument by which 
signals are actually written down by mag- 
netism, and not merely addressed to the 
sense of hearing or sight — was made by Pro- 



fessor S. F. B. Morse, of New York. He had 
conceived it as early as 1832. The instru- 
ment did not take form till some years later. 
It was impossible that either mode of signal- 
ing (the mode actually used by Professor 
Heury in 1831 or that conceived by Profess- 
or Morse in 1832) should come into public 
use or be economically a possibility so long 
as there existed no form of constant or sus- 
taining battery, and the batteries of Dan- 
iell and Grove were only known in 1836 and 
1837. 

In the construction of long lines of tele- 
graph it became early necessary to devise 
some practicable means of crossing the larger 
streams or the narrower estuaries by means 
of submerged conductors. When this had 
been successfully accomplished, the same 
system was naturally extended to the small- 
er seas or arms of the ocean, such as the 
British Chanuel and the Mediterranean. 
But when, a little more than twenty years 
ago, it was first proposed to lay an electric 
cable from continent to continent in the bed 
of the ocean itself, the audacity of the proj- 
ect was such that, at its first announce- 
ment, it struck the world as too visionary 
to be seriously considered. Even to con- 
trive a form of conductor which should com- 
bine the strength and completeness of insu- 
lation indispensable to such a purpose, was 
a problem in applied science of no slight dif- 
ficulty, and to lay it in its place demand- 
ed the exercise of mechanical skill of the 
highest order. Supposing it to have been 
laid, science, again, had not yet devised the 
means of making it available. The exhaust- 
less energy and indomitable perseverance 
of Mr. Cyrus W. Field nevertheless triumph- 
ed at last over all the practical difficulties ; 
and the patient study of the scientific side 
of the question by the electricians, especially 
by Sir William Thomson, with his marvel- 
ous fertility of invention, was equally suc- 
cessful in overcoming the rest. The elec- 
trical telegraph, therefore, one of the most 
magnificent gifts of science to the world, 
may be justly claimed as especially a gift 
of American science, and the energy which 
was mainly instrumental in giving it its 
latest and largest availability was no less 
American. 

Professor Henry was the first to point out 
the practicability of applying electro-mag- 



ELECTRO-MAGNETISM. 



327 



netism as a motive power, and in illustration 
of this lie constructed an oscillating appa- 
ratus, described in the American Journal of 
Science in 1829. The attempts which have 
been made to turn this power practically 
to account have been very numerous. Al- 
most or quite the earliest was made by 
Messrs. Davenport and Cook, of Vermont, in 
1836. A machine in model exhibited by 
them in New York attracted much atten- 
tion ; but a working engine which they sub- 
sequently attempted did not meet their ex- 
pectations. In all these forms of mechan- 
ism there is one unavoidable disadvantage, 
which in the infancy of the science was 
not known, consisting in the fact that the 
moving magnets generate in each other cur- 
rents directly opposed to those from which 
their own magnetic energy is derived ; and 
hence the dynamic power of the engine is 
not proportional to the static energy of 
its component magnets. Electro-magnetic 
engines of some power have in a few in- 
stances been tried, and subsequently aban- 
doned, not on account of any mechanical 
failure, but for reasons of economy. One 
of this description, constructed under the 
direction of De Jacobi at the expense of the 
Emperor of Russia, was employed to propel 
a boat on the Neva. Another was the elec- 
tro-magnetic locomotive of our countryman, 
Dr. Charles G. Page. This was remarkable 
for its original and ingenious method of 
applying the power, which was by means 
of solid cylindrical steel magnets rising 
and descending in the interior of a pile of 
short helices, the helices being successively 
thrown into and out of the circuit. With 
two such engines, Dr. Page drove a car 
weighing eleven tons and carrying four- 
teen passengers on a level track at the rate 
of nineteen miles an hour. Electro-mr g- 
netic engines can never compete with steam- 
engines in point of economy until it shall 
be possible to construct batteries in which 
the materials consumed shall be, weight for 
weight, a great deal cheaper than coal. 
Experimentally it has been proved that a 
grain of coal consumed under the boiler of 
a Cornish engine lifts 143 pounds one foot 
high, while a grain of zinc consumed in a 
battery to move an electro-magnetic engine 
lifts only eighty pounds to the same height. 
But it requires the consumption of a num- 



ber of grains of coal to produce one grain 
of zinc. 

The applications of the electro-magnet to 
purposes of use are too various to permit 
here an enumeration in detail. The astro- 
nomical electro-magnetic chronograph has 
been already mentioned. The instruments 
for measuring still more minute intervals of 
time, called chronoscopes, are dependent, in 
several of their large variety of forms, on 
similar means of operation. This same re- 
mark may be made of numerous very in- 
genious and very valuable contrivances in- 
troduced in recent years for demonstrating 
the laws of falling bodies, for registering 
vibrations in acoustics, for recording the 
indications of meteorological instruments, 
and for many other purposes auxiliary to 
scientific investigation. 

As more practical applications, there may 
be mentioned fire-alarms, by means of which 
information of the exact locality of a fire in 
any large city may be instantaneously com- 
municated to the central office, and definite 
orders issued at once to fire-companies how 
to proceed ; burglar-alarms, which instantly 
indicate the door or window in a dwelling 
at which entrance has been attempted, and 
at the same time turn on a light and arouse 
the sleepers by ringing bells or sounding 
rattles ; time-balls dropped in centres of 
business or iu sea-poi'ts by electrical com- 
munication from distant astronomical ob- 
servatories ; and clocks operated by electro- 
magnetism as a motive power, or systems 
of dials by which a single clock may show 
simultaneously the same time in every part 
of a large business establishment. In the 
year 1859 a clock of peculiar and original 
design, operated by electro-magnetism, was 
constructed, under the direction of the writ- 
er of this article, by Mr. E. S. Ritchie, of Bos- 
ton, for the observatory of the University 
of Mississippi. The pendulum was entirely 
free, the force required to maintain its mo- 
tion being applied by depositing a very light 
weight (of one or two grains) upon an arm 
of the pendulum at the beginning of the 
swing, and removing it in the middle, by an 
arrangement of electro-magnets. The small 
weight served itself to make and break the 
battery connections necessary to actuate the 
auxiliary mechanism. The intention was, 
by relieving the pendulum from the work 



328 



SCIENTIFIC PEOGRESS. 



of operating the escapement, and by redu- 
cing its swing as low as possible (to a frac- 
tion of a degree), to remove every external 
cause which might interfere with the per- 
fect uniformity of its beat. But a very low 
power was required to run it. A single cell 
of Farmer's so-called water battery (pure 
water next the zinc, and copper sulphate 
next the copper) was sufficient to maintain 
its action, but two were commonly used. 
Mechanically it was a perfect success, but 
after some months of action it was found 
that the electric contacts became vitiated 
by the spark produced, even with that low 
power, at every rupture of the circuit, and 
the current ceased to flow. Though the 
most refractory metals were employed, they 
were still vaporized and oxidized. The dif- 
ficulty was at length overcome by introdu- 
cing Fizeau's condenser into the circuit, by 
which the spark was effectually suppress- 
ed ; but owing to the troubles of the times, 
which prevented the completion of the ob- 
servatory, it was never brought into use. 

Within recent years some interesting con- 
tributions to the progress of electro-magnet- 
ic science have been made in this country 
by Professor A. F. Mayer, of Hoboken, New 
Jersey, Professor John Trowbridge, of Har- 
vard University, and others. Professor May- 
er's experiments have led to some very im- 
portant deductions as to the most effective 
forms of soft irou core to be given to electro- 
magnets, and have shown that in general, 
when such cores are solid cylinders, the cen- 
tral portion is practically ineffective, and 
may be removed without diminishing the 
power of the magnet. They have shown 
also that the inducing action of the envelop- 
ing wire on itself, or -that of the adjoining 
spirals on each other, has no effect on their 
power to magnetize the core, or on the in- 
tensity of the current passing through them. 
We owe also to Professor Mayer one of the 
most delicate and at the same time simple 
modes yet devised of investigating the re- 
sistance of conductors to electric currents 
passing through them. 

That the molecular changes produced in a 
bar of iron by magnetization are attended 
with simultaneous changes of dimensions, 
was rendered probable by the observation 
(made many years ago by Dr. Page) that 
they are attended by audible sounds, and 



was experimentally proved by Joule and 
Wertheim. By a very elaborate and care- 
fully conducted investigation, aided by the 
exceedingly delicate micrometric comparator 
constructed for the Coast Survey by Mr. Jo- 
seph Saxton, Professor Mayer has deter- 
mined quantitatively the precise character 
and magnitude of these changes. Professor 
Trowbridge has also made some interesting 
discoveries relating to this subject, among 
which is the fact that if the core of an elec- 
tro-magnet be made a part of a voltaic cir- 
cuit, and the magnetizing current be then 
sent through the enveloping helix by an- 
other battery, a magnetic power may be ob- 
tained materially greater than that which 
the latter current is capable of producing 
alone, but that this effect will not be re- 
peated if the magnetizing circuit be broken 
and again renewed. 

Voltaic Induction. — The power of a voltaic 
current to induce currents in neighboring 
conductors was discovered by Faraday in 
1831. If both conductors are motionless, 
the induced current is but momentary, oc- 
curring only when the primary current be- 
gins or ceases to flow. If they approach to-" 
ward or recede from each other, the induced 
current is continuous so long as this move- 
ment continues, being opposite in direction 
to the primary while approaching, and simi- 
lar in direction while receding. By using 
helices instead of single conductors, Mr. 
Faraday succeeded in producing induced 
currents of great energy. In the same year 
Professor Henry made the remarkable dis- 
covery that a voltaic current induces an ex- 
tra current in the conductor in which it is 
itself conveyed, which, however, manifests 
itself only on making or breaking connec- 
tion with the battery, the intensity being 
proportional to the length of the conductor, 
and being greatly increased by giving the 
conductor the form of a close spiral. Pro- 
fessor Henry demonstrated later that, if a 
series of closed circuits be placed side by 
side, the first receiving a primary current 
from the battery, then on making or break- 
ing battery connection a series of induced 
currents will be generated in these several 
circuits, which will be alternately in oppo- 
site directions. The system of conductors 
best adapted to this demonstration is a se- 
ries of flat spirals known as Henry's coils, 



INDUCTION COILS. 



329 



formed of wire, or better of copper ribbon, 
insulated. Induced currents of the ninth 
order have thus been demonstrated, aud the 
possible number is theoretically unlimited. 

Magneto-Electricity. — The year 1831 was 
very fruitful of electrical discovery. It was 
in this year that Faraday detected the pow- 
er of a permanent steel magnet to induce 
electric currents in neighboring conductors, 
and in this year also he succeeded in pro- 
ducing from the induction of such a magnet 
a visible electric spark. From this mem- 
orable discovery the science of magneto- 
electricity takes its date. Almost immedi- 
ately after it a powerful magneto-electric 
machine was constructed by Mr. Joseph 
Saxton, of Philadelphia, which was almost 
the hrst of its kind. Another, still more 
powerful, was subsequently invented by Dr. 
Page, who added the simple but ingenious 
contrivance called the pole - changer, by 
which the currents, incessantly reversed in 
the helices of the machine, are transmitted 
through the circuit in one constant direc- 
tion. With this improvement the machine 
may be made a substitute for a galvanic 
battery in the operations of electrolysis. 
Magneto-electric machines have consequent- 
ly in recent years to a large extent super- 
seded batteries for many important practi- 
cal purposes. The galvano-plastic art, so 
largely employed in copying in fac-simile 
objects of ornament and use, in plating and 
gilding, in duplicating the plates of the en- 
graver, in stereotyping pages for the letter- 
press, and in a variety of other ways, is now 
conducted almost entirely by the use of 
these machines. Constructed on a large 
scale, they have been employed by the gov- 
ernments of France and England to furnish 
electric lights for some of their most impor- 
tant light-houses. 

Induction Coils. — After the power of a per- 
manent magnet to induce electric currents 
had been demonstrated, it could not be 
doubted that electro-magnets would do the 
same. This was Faraday's inference, and 
experiment confirmed the anticipation. A 
secondary coil, surrounding but independ- 
ent of the coil of an electro-magnet, gave 
currents whenever the battery connection 
of the magnet was made or broken. In this 
discovery is found the first suggestion of a 
form of electrical apparatus which has in 



recent years become a powerful instrument 
of physical investigation, the induction coil. 
In its earliest form this apparatus was the 
invention of our countryman, Dr. Page, and 
was called by him the "separable helix." 
There was an inner helix, fixed upright 
upon a support, into the hollow interior of 
which might be introduced bars or wires 
of soft iron. An outer helix, which was 
removable, was designed to convey the in- 
duced current. Dr. Page, in the study of 
this instrument, made several important 
discoveries. These were, first, that the in- 
tensity of the induced current may be great- 
ly increased by making the wire of the sec- 
ondary coil many times longer, and also 
very much smaller, than the primary ; sec- 
ondly, that the effect of a number of soft 
iron wires introduced into the inner coil 
is vastly greater than that obtainable from 
the same weight of iron in a single bar; 
and thirdly, that unless the primary cur- 
rent is broken very abruptly, the induced 
current of that circuit will leap over the 
break, neutralizing to some extent, by sec- 
ondary induction, the induced current in 
the outer coil. To counteract this he in- 
vented an ingenious and successful contriv- 
ance called the spark - arresting circuit- 
breaker. These discoveries date back to 
1838 and earlier. In 1853 Mr. Fizeau, of 
Paris, suggested the use of a condenser con- 
structed on the principle of the Leyden-jar, 
as a means of absorbing the extra current 
in the primary ; aud this has since super- 
seded Page's circuit - breaker. About the 
same time Mr. Ruhmkorff, of Paris, com- 
menced the construction of the induction 
coils known by his name, which were in no 
respect different, except in magnitude, from 
the separable helices of Page above de- 
scribed, but which attracted much atten- 
tion in consequence of the length of spark 
they produced. This, in Page's instrument, 
had hardly exceeded one-eighth of an inch ; 
but in Ruhmkorff's it was increased to near- 
ly an entire inch, and in his later instru- 
ments to two or three inches. A practical 
limit to increase of power in this direction 
was, however, found in the liability of cur- 
rents of high intensity to strike through the 
insulation from layer to layer of the sec- 
ondary coil. This liability is the greater 
in proportion as the points of the wire of 



330 



SCIENTIFIC PKOGEESS. 



the helix which are brought near each oth- 
er in winding are more distant as measured 
upon the length of the wire itself. As a 
means of preventing it, it occurred to Mr. 
Ritchie to wind the wire in many flat spi- 
rals, placing these side by side and connect- 
ing them at their inner and outer extremi- 
ties, so as to form a continuous helical con- 
ductor of which no two points should be 
more distant from each other, measured 
along the wire, than the length of two such 
contiguous spirals, developed. The result 
was a surprising increase in the length of 
spark, which has been carried up by him to 
twelve, fifteen, and even twenty inches. 
One of Mr. Ritchie's coils was exhibited in 
Paris in 1860, by Professor McCulloh, of Co- 
lumbia College, New York. By an exami- 
nation of this, Mr. Ruhmkorff became ac- 
quainted with the mode of its construction, 
which Mr. Ritchie had not previously dis- 
closed, and adopting it, produced others of 
enormous power — one of which projected 
sparks two feet in length. For this great 
success, mainly due to the ingenuity of our 
countryman, Mr. Ruhnikorft* received in 
1864 the prize of 50,000 francs offered in 
1852 by Napoleon III. for the most impor- 
tant discovery connected with the progress 
of electricity. 

Static Electricity. — Some very interesting 
discoveries in static electricity were made 
by Professor Henry as early as 1830. He 
demonstrated that the discharge of a Ley- 
den -jar consists of a series of oscillations 
backward and forward, something like the 
vibration of a spring. The mode of proof 
employed in this demonstration is at once 
simple and ingenious. It rests on the two 
experimentally ascertained facts — first, that 
a steel needle may be magnetized by sur- 
rounding it with a spiral conductor, and 
sending through the conductor the discharge 
of a Leyden-jar ; and secondly, that there is 
a point of saturation beyond which the nee- 
dle will not receive magnetism. By passing 
successive discharges of gradually increas- 
ing intensity through the coil, the needle 
will undergo changes of polarity, showing 
that it derives its magnetism alternately 
from the direct and the reversed movement 
of the electric force. It follows that the 
electric spark, though to the eye apparently 
single, is, in fact, made up of many sparks. 



This multiplicity has recently been optical- 
ly demonstrated by Professor Rood, of Co- 
lumbia College, who, by means of a rapidly 
rotating mirror, has made the successive 
component sparks visible. A very striking- 
palpable demonstration of the same fact 
was also exhibited to the National Acade- 
my of Sciences in November, 1874, by Pro- 
fessor A. M. Mayer, of Hoboken, New Jersey. 
Professor Mayer caused disks of blackened 
tissue-paper to revolve with great rapidity 
between the points through which the dis- 
charge of the Leyden-jar is made. Subse- 
quent examination of the disk shows it to 
be perforated with a very great number of 
minute holes along the circular arc which 
was passing between the points during the 
brief continuance of the discharge. 

The fact which he had demonstrated of 
the jar, Professor Henry afterward proved 
to be true of thunder-clouds. These stand 
to the earth beneath them in the relation 
of the coatings of the jar, the stratum of 
air between being the insulating medium. 
When the insulation is broken through, the 
lightning flash which follows is multiple 
and oscillating, presenting on a grand scale 
an analogy to the discharge of the jar. 

The duration of flashes of lightning, as 
well as of the spark from the jar, has been 
the subject of interesting investigations by 
Professor Rood, in which he has succeeded 
in measuring more minute intervals of time 
than have ever before been made the sub- 
ject of exact determination. By his meth- 
ods, which appear to be quite unexception- 
able, it is proved that a jar of small surface 
discharges itself in a space of time not great- 
er than forty one-billionths of a second; 
and that its light, though of inconceivably 
brief duration, makes surrounding objects 
perfectly visible. As there is reason to be- 
lieve that this time is at least tenfold great- 
er than is necessary to impress the retina, it 
follows that the perfect sensation of vision 
may be excited in an interval as brief as 
four one-billionths of a second. The dura- 
tion of lightning flashes is much greater. 
Besides investigating the form and nature 
of the spark by optical methods, as already 
mentioned, Professor Rood has employed 
photography in the same research, and has 
demonstrated marked differences between 
the positive and negative sparks, as well as 



CHEMISTRY. 



331 



between the sparks obtained through the 
jar from the induction coil and from the 
common frictional machine. 

In thermo-electricity not much has been 
done by American investigators. In 1840 
Dr. J.W. Draper published a memoir on the 
electro-motive power of heat, with descrip- 
tions of improved thermo-electrical couples. 
A pretty effective thermo-electric battery 
has been constructed by Mr. Farmer, of Bos- 
ton, thirty-six elements of which are about 
equivalent to one of Grove's nitric acid ele- 
ments. Professor Rood has made an inter- 
esting application of a thermo-electrical 
couple to the determination of the heat pro- 
duced by percussion when the mechanical 
force exerted is very small. He has been 
able thus to demonstrate that in the fall of 
a weight of a single pound through trivial 
heights, varying from one to five inches, 
the amouut of heat generated is measura- 
ble, and is directly as the amount of living 
force acquired by the body in falling. 

CHEMISTRY. 

Chemistry as a science may be said to 
have been the creation of the century we are 
reviewing. Many important facts which 
have now a recognized place in this science 
had, it is true, been previously gathered ; 
but they were either facts of accidental dis- 
covery, or they had been discovered in the 
course of investigations guided by no intel- 
ligent theory. The doctrine of phlogiston, 
introduced early in the eighteenth century 
by Stahl, though now usually spoken of as 
a reproach to the science of that age, was 
really a step of progress, for it was part of 
a system which proposed to ascertain by ex- 
perimental research the elementary compo- 
sition of natural bodies. But it is also true 
that the overthrow of that doctrine by La- 
voisier, near the end of the same century, 
forms the epoch from which modern chem- 
istry in a proper sense takes its rise. The 
contemporaries of this great philosopher, 
Black, Cavendish, and Priestley in England, 
Scheele in Sweden, and Wenzel in Saxony, 
contributed largely by their discoveries, and 
by their researches on heat and on the laws 
of chemical affinity, to build up the new 
science on a rational basis. The doctrine 
of definite proportions, which had been al- 
ready substantially established by the la- 



bors of Higgins, Proust, and Richter, was 
formally announced by Dalton in his atomic 
theory, taught as early as 1804 and publish- 
ed in 1808. The question whether there 
does not exist, also, a law of definite propor- 
tion between the combining or equivalent 
weights of the different bodies called ele- 
mentary, was naturally suggested as a con- 
sequence of this discovery. When the num- 
bers are compared with the assumption of 
any particular equivalent weight as unity, 
while the results are in many cases integral, 
there remain always some which continue 
to be fractional. A comparatively recent 
and laborious investigation of this subject, 
however, by Dumas, has led to the result 
that when a unit is adopted which is equal 
to one-fourth of the equivalent weight of 
hydrogen, all the numbers are integral. It 
is, therefore, a view not without plausibility, 
entertained by some chemists at present, 
that all the bodies commonly called element- 
ary may be compounds; and even that, on 
a complete decomposition of them all, there 
might remain but a single elementary sub- 
stance. The power of heat, when sufficient- 
ly exalted in temperature, to break up all 
known chemical compounds, has been fully 
established of late years by Henri St. Clair 
Deville ; and spectroscopic observation has 
shown that many substances exist as vapors 
in the sun and the stars which no degree 
of heat which we can artificially produce 
upon the earth is competent to vaporize. 
It is therefore not imreasonable to presume 
that, if there is such a primitive elementary 
matter as is above supposed, it may be set 
free in the intense heat of the self-luminous 
celestial bodies. And it is an interesting 
fact that, in the spectroscopic examination 
of the envelopes of the sun, there are detect- 
ed lines which belong to no element known 
upon our planet, and which seem also to in- 
dicate the presence of a substance lighter 
than hydrogen. 

Organic chemistry, or the chemistry of 
animal and vegetable compounds, became 
early a distinct department of the science. 
The study of organized bodies led to the 
discovery of sei-ies, in which a number of 
bodies differ from each other only in the 
number of times a simpler definite combi- 
nation is repeated in their formulae. This 
discovery was first distinctly announced by 



332 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



Dr. James Shiel, of St. Louis, Missouri. In 
this same study also was found the con- 
ception of types, in which one element may 
he replaced hy another — a conception which 
lies at the foundation of the chemical sci- 
ence of the present day. This conception, 
originated by Dumas, and followed up and 
developed by Laurent and Gerhardt, was 
first reduced to its most simple and satis- 
factory form of expression by Professor T. 
Sterry Hunt, now of Boston, who so early 
as 1848 demonstrated that all the various 
saline forms are reducible to two, the types 
of which are seen in water, and in hydro- 
gen with the equivalent doubled. In a se- 
ries of papers published subsequently at 
intervals, Professor Hunt farther applied 
these views and extended tliem to embrace 
the multiple or condensed types afterward 
adopted by Williamson and Gerhardt, to 
whom the entire credit of these important 
generalizations has been often ascribed in 
foreign publications. 

So wide is the field covered by the sci- 
ence of chemistry, and so rapid has been the 
growth of the science during the last half 
century, that any attempt in the brief space 
at our disposal to do justice to the numer- 
ous laborers to whose activity this great 
progress is due, wovdd be vain. In this de- 
partment of science our country has pro- 
duced a larger number of active investi- 
gators than in any other, and of these also 
a larger proportion have become honorably 
eminent. We must content ourselves in 
this place with mentioning a few only of 
the names which have become worthily 
identified with the history of American 
chemistry. Among the early teachers of 
this science in our country who, without 
engaging largely in original research, did 
good service in their enlightened defense 
of the doctrines of the new school of La- 
voisier, may be fitly mentioned Dr. John 
Maclean, of Princeton College (elected 
1795), Dr. Benjamin Rush, of the University 
of Pennsylvania (1769), Dr. James Wood- 
house, of the same institution (1795), and 
Dr. Samuel L. Mitchill, of Columbia Col- 
lege, New York (1792). Both Dr. Wood- 
house and Dr. Mitchill published somewhat 
largely upon chemical topics. Dr. Mitchill 
was a man of exceptionally varied attain- 
ments, but his favorite studies were in nat- 



ural history, especially in zoology, in which 
he was long regarded as the highest author- 
ity in the United States. 

In 1801 there was read before the Chem- 
ical Society of Philadelphia a memoir " On 
the Supply and Application of the Blow- 
Pipe," by a young man of twenty years of 
age, destined subsequently to attain a high 
celebrity — Robert Hare. In this was de- 
scribed the apparatus long known as " Hare's 
compound blow-pipe," and more recently 
as the oxyhydrogen blow -pipe, the most 
powerful means yet known for generating 
artificial heat. The apparatus referred to 
was not so much an invention, in the ordi- 
nary sense of the word, as a logical deduc- 
tion from a consideration of the conditions 
necessary to secure the maximum effect 
from a given amount of heat generated. 
Lavoisier and others had obtained remark- 
able effects by directing a stream of oxygen 
upon ignited carbon. In this case, how- 
ever, though the body to be operated on 
was raised to a very high temperature on 
the side which rested on the carbon sup- 
port, this temperature did not reach the 
upper surface, and the fusion or volatiliza- 
tion attempted was only partially accom- 
plished. Mr. Hare reflected that this diffi- 
culty might be got over if some means could 
be discovered of "clothing the upper sur- 
face with some burning matter the heat of 
which might be equal to that of the incan- 
descent carbon." It soon occurred to him 
that a flame produced by the combustion 
of the oxygen and hydrogen gases ought, 
" according to the theory of the French 
chemists" (for this was in advance of any 
demonstration), to be attended with a high- 
er heat than even that generated by the 
combustion of carbon. But it was known 
that a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen in 
proper proportion to produce a complete 
combustion is dangerously explosive, and 
in order to attain the end in view some 
means of creating the flame had to be de- 
vised which should be free from this dan- 
ger. The expedient actually adopted — that 
of storing the gases in separate vessels and 
bringing them together by tubes which 
meet at the point of ignition — seems sim- 
ple enough now; but that it was not so 
obvious as it seems is made evident by the 
fact that, some fifteen years later, Dr. E. 



CHEMICAL INVESTIGATORS. 



333 



D. Clarke, Professor of Mineralogy in Cam- 
bridge, England, introduced and employed 
an oxyhydrogen blow-pipe in which the 
gases were mingled in explosive proportions 
in the same vessel. If Dr. Clarke, in 1816, 
knew nothing of what Hare had done in 
1802, and had described in the same year in 
Tilloch's Philosophical Magazine, the construc- 
tion he gave his apparatus proves that the 
artifice by which the original inventor pro- 
vided against the possibility of explosion 
was one which would not readily occur to 
any but an ingenious mind. If he did pos- 
sess a previous knowledge of the invention 
of Hare, his silence in his own paper in re- 
gard to it admits of no honorable explana- 
tion. The blow-pipe was but one of Dr. 
Hare's very numerous contributions to the 
instrumental means of chemical investiga- 
tion, but we have room for the mention of 
no other. 

Professor Benjamin Silliman, the elder, 
Professor of Chemistry in Yale College 
(elected 1802), continued for a long series 
of years to occupy a very conspicuous po- 
sition in the world of American science. 
Though he published a large number of 
papers on chemical topics, as well as a vo- 
luminous systematic treatise on the general 
subject, his early acquired reputation rest- 
ed in great measure on his eloquent and 
forceful presentation of the truths of sci- 
ence to his numerous classes and to popu- 
lar audiences. The monument which will 
speak most enduringly of his labors, how- 
ever, is undoubtedly the Journal of Science, 
one of the most powerful stimulants of the 
scientific spirit which has existed among 
us, established by him when this spirit was 
at a low ebb, and maintained by him al- 
most single-handed for years under discour- 
agements against which few would ha^e 
had the energy to persevere. 

Dr. Samuel Guthrie, of Sackett's Harbor, 
New York, deserves mention here as the 
discoverer of the very remarkable anaesthet- 
ic compound known as chloroform. It is a 
little curious that the same discovery was 
made about the same time by Soubeiran, a 
French chemist, and that both discoverers 
were similarly mistaken as to its nature, 
and both called it chloric ether. Soubeiran 
published his discovery in February, 1831, 
and Guthrie his in January, 1832. It was 



not till 1834 that the true constitution of 
the substance was understood, when it was 
analyzed by Dumas, who gave it the name 
it has since borne. 

The numerous and important contribu- 
tions of Dr. John W. Draper to physical 
science have been already mentioned. His 
chemical researches are scarcely less orig- 
inal, though many of them occupy the bor- 
der region between physics and chemistry. 
The most noticeable are his ingenious ex- 
periments and deductions on osmosis, and 
on interstitial movements taking place 
among the molecules of a solid, as in cases 
of alloys in which the adulterating metals 
make their way to the surface. Also his 
beautiful and sensitive photometric appa- 
ratus, called by him originally the tithom- 
eter, in which chlorine and hydrogen are 
mingled in combining proportions. In ab- 
solute darkness the gases remain free, but 
on exposure to light they combine with a 
rapidity dependent on the intensity. One 
of his later publications is his treatise on 
Human Physiology, which discusses with 
much originality questions concerning the 
chemistry of animal life, as well as the 
chemical and physical functions of the va- 
rious organs of the body. 

Dr. William B. Rogers, of Boston, has pub- 
lished many chemical papers, some of them 
of special interest. One of these embraces 
the discovery tbat the thermal springs of 
Virginia contain free nitrogen in large pro- 
portion, exceediug in quantity the carbonic 
acid and the hydrogen sulphide. Another 
describes a method of determining carbon 
in graphite, which is still one of the best 
methods of effecting the same determina- 
tion in the analysis of cast iron. 

Dr. Charles T. Jackson, of Boston, has 
been one of the most active investigators 
the country has produced. His chemical 
and geological papers number nearly seven- 
ty. What has given him probably a wider 
reputation than any other of his discoveries 
has been the efficacy of ether to produce 
anaesthesia. For this he has been made 
the recipient of honorable decorations from 
many European governments, yet his title 
to the credit attributed to him has been 
contested by two of his countrymen, both 
now deceased — Dr. W. T. G. Morton, of Bos- 
ton, and Dr. Horace Wells, of Hartford. 



334 



SCIENTIFIC PEOGRESS. 



Dr. James Blake, of Sau Francisco, is no- 
ticeable for his interesting researches in 
physiological chemistry made by experi- 
ments on the living subject. Two of his 
conclusions are striking: first, that the 
character of the changes produced in living 
matter by inorganic compounds depends 
more on the physical properties of the re- 
agent than on the chemical; and second, 
that the action of such compounds on liv- 
ing matter appears not to be related to the 
changes which they produce in the same 
substances when not living. 

Dr. Wolcott Gibbs, now Rumford Professor 
of the Applications of Science in Harvard 
University, commenced his career as an in- 
vestigator while an under-graduate in Co- 
lumbia College, in 1840, in a description of a 
new form of magneto-electric machine, and 
an account of a carbon voltaic battery. 
This, it will be perceived, was earlier than 
the date of Bunsen's carbon battery. The 
contributions of Dr. Gibbs both to chemistry 
and to physics have been very numerous. 
The more important relating to chemistry 
are, "New General Methods of Chemical 
Analysis," "Theory of Polybasic Acids," 
" Researches on the Platiuum Metals," and, 
in association with Professor Genth, "Re- 
searches on the Ammonio-Cobalt Bases" — a 
memoir which occupied the authors several 
years, and is more full of new results than 
any chemical research before undertaken in 
this couutry. This was published in 1857 
among the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowl- 
edge. 

Dr. Gibbs has recently announced the em- 
pirical discovery of a new optical constant, 
which may possibly prove to be an impor- 
tant contribution to the resources of the 
analytic chemist. The number of interfer- 
ence bands produced in the spectrum be- 
tween two given wave lengths by the par- 
tial interception of the light falling on the 
prism by any transparent substance is dif- 
ferent for different substances, and for the 
same substance diminishes as the density 
diminishes with increase of temperature. 
For any given substance, therefore, and for 
a constant thickness, the actual number of 
bands produced, divided by the density, 
gives a sensibly constant quotient ; and 
this quotient is called by Dr. Gibbs the in- 
terferential constant. Its value in mixtures 



is a function of the values belonging to the 
components, and in compounds a function, 
apparently, of those of the molecular con- 
stituents ; hence its probable usefulness in 
the operations of analysis. 

Professor Frederick A. Genth, of the Uni- 
versity of Pennsylvania, a native of Ger- 
many, was a chemist of distinction before 
coming to this country. The first ammonio- 
cobalt bases were discovered by him in 1846. 
As an analytic chemist he is without a su- 
perior. His chemical labors of recent years 
have been chiefly contributions to the chem- 
ical constitution of minerals. 

Dr. J. Lawrence Smith, of Louisville, is 
the author of many valuable researches in 
chemistry and mineralogy. In 1850 he ad- 
dressed an important memoir to the Acad- 
emy of Sciences of Paris on the geology ^ 
mineralogy, and chemical history of emery, 
prepared after a thorough examination of 
the emery deposits of Asia Minor. This 
subject had been previously but little un- 
derstood, and the memoir was received with 
marks of high approbation. Dr. Smith has 
made larger investigations upon the phys- 
ical and chemical constitution of meteorites 
than any other American chemist. Of his 
very numerous scientific papers he has re- 
cently collected and published forty-seven 
in a volume. 

Professor T. Sterry Hunt, whose name has 
been already mentioned, has been the most 
active contributor to theoretic chemistry in 
the United States. The credit due to him 
in the construction of the theory of types 
has been already mentioned. His various 
memoirs on chemical geology published from 
1859 to 1870 have made him, perhaps, the 
highest living authority upon that subject. 
In fertility he is unrivaled, having within 
the last thirty years produced between one 
hundred and fifty and two hundred scientif- 
ic papers, many of them elaborate. 

Dr. J. P. Cooke, of Harvard University, is 
another of our prominent chemists whose 
labors have done much to advance theoret- 
ical chemistry. He is the author of Chem- 
ical Physics and First Principles of Chemical 
Philosophy, both of them profound and ad- 
mirable expositions of theory, and of other 
publications of less extent, exhibiting great 
originality. One of these, a memoir on the 
numerical relations between atomic weights, 



APPLIED CHEMISTRY. 



335 



and the classification of the chemical ele- 
ments, elicited expressions of high commen- 
dation from Sir John Herschel before the 
British Association for the Advancement of 
Science. 

The applications of chemistry to the arts 
are too various, too large, and too multiplied 
to admit of enumeration here. There is 
scarcely a department of industry into which 
they do not enter ; while, on the other hand, 
there are many industries which, without 
this science, could not exist at all. In the 
words of Dr. J. Lawrence Smith at the Priest- 
ley centennial, "Industrial chemistry links 
itself with every modern art in such an in- 
timate manner that were we to take away 
the influence and results of chemistry, it 
would be almost like taking away the laws 
of gravity from the universe ; industrial 
chaos would result in one case, as material 
chaos would in the other." In some in- 
stances chemistry has rendered to industry 
a reduplicated aid — first, by creating or by 
greatly improving the industry itself; and 
secondly, by providing in wonderfully in- 
creased abundance or at wonderfully di- 
minished expense the material on which or 
through which the industry is exercised. 
For instance, the manufactures of glass, of 
soap, and of textile fabrics, while indebted 
in a variety of ways unnecessary to specify 
to chemical science, are largely dependent 
upon a particular chemical product, the car- 
bonate of soda, commonly called in com- 
merce soda-ash. By the substitution, early 
in this century, of the manufactured car- 
bonate, derived by a chemical process from 
common salt, instead of the natural sub- 
stance previously obtained from sea-weed, 
the price was reduced to the tenth or twelfth 
part of what it had been before. By a new 
and more recently invented process this cost 
is likely to be reduced still lower. Again, 
in the manufacture of paper, to which chem- 
istry has in various ways contributed, great 
embarrassments have in later years been 
experienced in consequence of the growth 
of a demand outrunning the supply of the 
substances out of which paper is made. 
Chemistry has done much to meet this de- 
mand by rendering available vast masses of 
rags which from discoloration had been pre- 
viously unavailable, and by converting the 
fibre of various kinds of wood and grasses 



into suitable material for the same manu- 
facture. Early in this century the process 
of bleaching linens occupied many months, 
and was attended with much labor, and 
some hazard of loss from mildew. Chemis- 
try has made this a process occupying at 
present but a few hours. To every depart- 
ment of metallurgy chemistry has largely 
contributed, as is illustrated by the Bessemer 
process for steel, and in nearly every eco- 
nomical process in use for the precious met- 
als. To the dyer's art a whole series of the 
most brilliant colors has been supplied, ri- 
valing and often surpassing the rarest and 
most costly of those which have been hith- 
erto only obtainable from natural sources. 
To the miner and the engineer have been 
furnished, in gun-cotton, nitro- glycerine, 
dynamite, and other explosive compounds, 
sources of resistless energy to aid in the 
prosecution of their often gigantic under- 
takings. The sources of artificial illumi- 
nation at present in general use — viz., kero- 
sene, stearine, paraffine, and coal gas — are 
the gifts exclusively of chemistry to the 
common uses of life. Fifty years ago the 
substance known as India rubber had no use 
but that which its name implies, to efface 
the marks of the draughtsman's pencil. At 
present, under the transformations given to 
it by chemistry, it enters into a larger va- 
riety of manufactures than almost any oth- 
er material, except wood and a few of the 
metals. 

The benefits rendered to the science of 
medicine by chemical discovery and chem- 
ical art are beyond calculation. An entire- 
ly new pharmacopoeia has been created by 
it, in which the active principles of the 
drugs known to the old have been separated 
from the masses of iuert matter with which 
they are naturally combined; and to these, 
new compounds have been added of an effi- 
cacy in assuaging pain or subduing disease 
surpassing all former experience. Of the 
wonderful variety of exquisite perfumes now 
offered to the choice of the fashionable world, 
only a very limited number are any longer 
sought from natural sources. Most are arti- 
ficial products, in which chemical art has out- 
done nature. The numerous delicious prepa- 
rations by which the confectioner succeeds 
in delighting the palates of the lovers of 
sweet things are due to a similar origin. Of 



336 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



the different descriptions of strong liquors, 
of which, to the misfortune of mankind, so 
incredible quantities are annually consumed 
as beverages, uuder the names of rum, gin, 
choice brandies, superior old Bourbon, Mo- 
nongahela, etc., probably half or more than 
half the quantities sold are merely dilute 
solutions of alcohol, to which chemically 
prepared essential oils and chemically pre- 
pared sugars have communicated so perfect- 
ly the odors, flavors, and colors of the liq- 
uor imitated, as to defy detection by the 
most practiced dealer or drinker. In this 
case it is some compensation to be able to say 
that the chemical substances employed are 
entirely innocent, and that the liquors so 
manufactured, contrary to the popular im- 
pression, have nothing in them more nox- 
ious than the alcohol they contain ; which, 
however, is just as noxious in the genuine 
liquors of the same name. Some of the gifts 
of chemistry to the ordinary uses of life 
have been so long and so constantly famil- 
iar that we habitually forget the source to 
which we owe them. The adhesive stamp, 
the gun-cap, the lucifer-match, are used daily 
and hourly by multitudes to whom it never 
for a moment occurs that science has had 
any thing to do with their production. And 
thus it happens, not only in small things 
but in great, that precisely in the points in 
which science has been most serviceable to 
mankind, her services, for the very reason 
that they are most constantly in sight, cease 
to be regarded as services, but are habitual- 
ly confounded in the common mind with the 
things which come into existence in the or- 
dinary course of nature's operations. 

In closing this cursory sketch of a cen- 
tury's progress in science, a word may not 
be out of place as to the effect of this prog- 
ress on the mental characteristics of the 
race. It is certain that not only has in- 
crease of knowledge largely modified preva- 
lent popular opinions in regard to natural 
phenomena, but also that the modes by 
which knowledge has been increased have 
still more largely modified the spirit in 
which every new question is received which 
addresses the popular judgment. Even the 
less educated in enlightened lands no longer 
tremble at the advent of a comet, or imag- 
ine human destinies to be controlled by the 



stars, or see a mischievous sprite in the 
Will-o'-the-wisp, or conceive it possible for 
man by magical arts to subvert the ordinary 
course of nature. One by ono those myster- 
ies in natural things which to the common 
mind have heretofore from the foundation 
of the world been associated with the su- 
pernatural, have resolved themselves, under 
the scrutiny of scientific investigation, into 
their simple natural causes. The rainbow, 
the lightning, the tempest, the earthquake, 
the volcano, the aurora borealis, the star- 
shower, and even the rarer and more start- 
ling phenomenon, the shower of seeming 
blood, by which whole provinces have been 
occasionally appalled, are no longer regard- 
ed as evidences of the arbitrary interposi- 
tion of invisible agencies, and no longer 
afford cause for either alarm or encourage- 
ment. It is a dogma of modern science that 
all the phenomena of the natural world, 
without exception, are subject to unalter- 
able law; and accordingly that mysteries, 
wherever they still exist, are only evidences 
of our still existing ignorance. Standing 
upon this law, the investigator accepts no 
solution of a difficulty which does not clear- 
ly associate the observed effect with its ef- 
ficient cause. For him authority has no 
weight whatever. He demands incontro- 
vertible proof for every proposition ad- 
vanced. The scientific spirit is, therefore, 
not a spirit of respect for traditions as tra- 
ditions. It respects them only for the truth 
they contain. Its motto is, Prove all things 
— hold fast that which is good. 

This spirit, which has been always that 
of the true investigators of nature, has in 
past centuries been confined almost exclu- 
sively to those who were immediately en- 
gaged in such investigation. The popular 
spirit has been directly opposed to it, even 
up to the point of hostility and bitterness ; 
so that any man who, like Albertus Magnus, 
or Roger Bacon, or Baptista Porta, allowed 
himself to seek for natural causes in natu- 
ral things, drew upon himself the dangerous 
suspicion of dealing with spirits of dark- 
ness. Those were ages in which authority 
was all in all ; in our own, this matter is en- 
tirely reversed, and authority has ceased to 
be any thing. 

The effect of this change is especially no- 
ticeable in the discussion of questions which 



THE NATURAL SCIENCES. 



337 



concern education. The ancient learning is 
no longer respected because it is ancient. 
Rather, on the contrary, its claim to preced- 
ence as the basis of the highest education 
is prejudiced by the consideration that it 
was the only learning of the age which gave 
it such prominence. Larger space is nat- 
urally demanded for that new knowledge 
which is the growth of our own time, and 
is based on positive demonstration — knowl- 
edge which reveals to us the natural laws 
under the rigorous rule of which we are 
compelled to live, and which it concerns 
the immediate welfare of every individual 
to know. Hence the growing favor for 
what in recent years has received the name 
of " the new education." It is a demand 
that of the three elements, the good, the 
true, and the beautiful, the second shall 
have as full a recognition as the other two. 

The same effect may be observed in the 
discussion of religious questions. The basis 
of belief is investigated with a freedom un- 
known to other centuries. This is not mere- 
ly the prompting of a skeptical spirit. If 
the unbeliever would discredit revelation, 
the believer no less desires to give a reason 
for the faith that is in him. There is no 
ground for the imputation which we hear 
occasionally expressed, that science is hos- 
tile to religion, or that infidelity is more rife 
in the present age than in the last. Modern 
science hardly existed when the French Re- 
public, "one and indivisible," abolished re- 
ligion by public decree. The thing which 
is true is that the infidelity of our time is 
open in its utterance, while that of other 
periods has been restrained by fear of penal- 
ties both judicial and social. It is in the 
nature of things impossible that science and 
religion should be in conflict, since truth, 
which is the aim of the one, is also the sub- 
stance of the other, and truth can never be 
inconsistent with itself. 

A failure to recognize this simple prin- 
ciple has operated more powerfully than 
any other cause to retard the progress of 
the world's enlightenment ; and it must be 
counted as the largest of the services which 
modern science with its methods of free in- 
quiry has rendered to the race, that it has 
burst at length the shackles by which hu- 
man thought has been held for centuries in 
bondage. 

22 



II.— NATURAL SCIENCE. 

At the commencement of the century 
which is distinguished by the existence of 
the United States of America as an inde- 
pendent nation, students of nature had re- 
gard almost alone to "natural history," or 
the observation and description of what in 
nature immediately appealed to their senses. 

At the present time the " natural sciences" 
are acknowledged constituents of general 
science, that great superstructure which 
enables us by a long-established series of 
observations and assured deductions to 
predicate the nature of the unseen from 
what has been observed, and to throw into 
a few terse general propositions and princi- 
ples the results of all our studies. 

How the several branches of natural his- 
tory have grown and developed into the 
natural sciences, and what quota America 
has contributed to this progress, will be the 
subject of inquiry in this chapter. 

The distinction just indicated between 
the stages of our knowledge of natural ob- 
jects in times past and present is exempli- 
fied in the relations of the several branch- 
es to schemes of classification of general 
knowledge. In the celebrated synopsis of 
Bacon, in which the triple division is based 
on the faculties which are called into ac- 
tivity in the consideration of the various 
branches, "natural history" is placed with 
"civil history" as a branch wherein "mem- 
ory" is chiefly demanded, while the " mathe- 
matical sciences" belong to the domain over 
which "reason" presides — "philosophy." 
Such was in his time and long afterward, 
and, in fact, until this century had well ad- 
vanced, to some extent a true exhibit of 
the facts and the mode of study of nature. 
Natural history was, indeed, a mere record 
of empirical observations and of the crude 
impressions produced on the senses. The 
chief aim of the naturalist was then to 
know the name of a given species, and only 
long afterward did the name become of sec- 
ondary importance, and simply a means to- 
ward an end, that end being the knowledge 
of the relations of the forms in question to 
others, aud, a posteriori, to the economy and 
plan of nature. 

FIRST STEPS. 

It was in 1766 that Linnaeus published 
his last edition of the Systema Naturce ; in 



338 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



the earlier editions of that celebrated work 
he had, in intention at least, incorporated 
all the species of animals, plants, and min- 
erals which had been made known in a rec- 
ognizable manner by his predecessors and 
contemporaries, and, in this final edition 
published during his lifetime, he had sys- 
tematically applied the binomial method of 
nomenclature, which has been so powerful 
an auxiliary as a method of notation to the 
naturalist ; he also revised, and in a num- 
ber of cases very materially modified, the 
arrangement adopted in the previous edi- 
tions of his work, and he added the species 
in each department of nature which had in 
the mean while been described. This, there- 
fore, will furnish a fitting starting-point for 
our inquiries in each case ; and this work, 
be it observed, was almost the last in which 
a single naturalist attempted to cover the 
whole domain of nature, and to recapitulate 
all known species. The impulse which had 
been given to the cultivation of natural 
history, and the zeal with which travelers 
collected, as well as the researches of the 
European colonists in the lands of their 
adoption, soon increased the numbers of 
species to such an extent that their survey 
by one man became impossible. 

The species of animals and plants — espe- 
cially the former — known to Linnaeus from 
America, or at least from the limits of the 
present United States, were comparatively 
few. It is true that in numerous works de- 
voted to the description of the country or 
its several parts the characteristic species 
were enumerated, and even alleged lists of 
species were published ; but in few cases 
were they scientifically or at all intelligibly 
described : in default of specimens, there- 
fore, they could not be incorporated in the 
Systema Naturce. Linnaeus was consequent- 
ly confined in his work to the descriptions 
or identifications of the species which were 
in the museums or herbaria of Europe ac- 
cessible to him, or which had been sent to 
him by American correspondents, among 
the most conspicuous of whom were Cad- 
wallader Colden, of New York, and Alexan- 
der Garden, of South Carolina. A student 
of his own, the afterward well-known Kalm, 
in 1747 and 1748 visited this country and 
collected especially the plants. The com- 
parative facilities then enjoyed for the ma- 



nipulation of plants, the tastes of his cor- 
respondents, and, indeed, Linnseus's own 
greater familiarity with the vegetable king- 
dom, all tended to his acquaintance with 
our plants rather than animals, and conse- 
quently while the number of species of the 
former attributed by him to North America 
was considerable, that of the latter was 
small. 

SOCIETIES AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT. 

Although after Linnaeus equal individual 
attention to the several branches became 
rare, societies devoted to the cultivation 
of all in common originated, and several 
of them exercised a notable influence on 
the development of science in its various 
branches, either being called into existence 
in response to an active want for the means 
of expression for individuals, or being them- 
selves the agents for eliciting communica- 
tions which might otherwise have never 
been made known ; these, therefore, always 
demand special notice in a history of sci- 
ence. 

The earliest of such societies, founded 
when the States were yet colonies of Brit- 
ain — the American Philosophical Society 
for promoting useful knowledge, held at 
Philadelphia — was originated by Franklin 
and some companions as early as 1743 ; its 
first volume of Transactions was published 
in 1771. The American Academy of Arts 
and Sciences was next established, in 1780, 
at Boston, and published the first volume 
of its Memoirs in 1785. Both these societies 
contributed much in their youth (as they 
still do) to the cultivation of the natural 
sciences, and various articles on animals, 
plants, and minerals were published in 
their serial volumes. Before the close of 
the eighteenth century (1799) another so- 
ciety — the Connecticut Academy of Arts 
and Sciences — was founded at New Haven, 
but after the publication of one volume 
languished, or was entirely inactive, till aft- 
er the establishment of the Sheffield Scien- 
tific School, when it awoke to active life, 
and has since (1866-75) published many ex- 
cellent memoirs. In 1814 there was found- 
ed in New York a society whose existence 
was ephemeral, but which played a notable 
part in American science ; this association 
was the Literary and Philosophical Society 



EXPLORATIONS. 



339 



of New York. In 1815 it published a large 
quarto volume of Transactions, which con- 
tained memoirs by Dr. Samuel L. Mitchill, 
Governor De Witt Clinton, Dr. David Hos- 
ack, and others less known, but the princi- 
pal article was by Dr. Mitchill, and was a 
monograph of the fishes of the State, illus- 
trated by six plates, containing sixty fig- 
ures. For years afterward the society was 
inactive, and after publishing the first part 
of a second volume in 1825, dissolved. The 
year 1814 saw also the birth of a society 
destined to have an extraordinary connec- 
tion with the growth of science in the Unit- 
ed States generally — the Academy of Nat- 
ural Sciences of Philadelphia. This body 
commenced the publication of a Journal in 
May, 1817, and in this first volume, as well 
as in all the succeeding ones, were publish- 
ed some of the most important papers on 
the animals, plants, and minerals of the 
country. A very considerable portion of 
our most familiar species of animals was, 
in fact, first made known in that journal, 
and in the earlier volumes Say and Lesueur 
published their classical memoirs. In 1818 
the Lyceum of Natural History in the city 
of New York was organized, and a new im- 
petus was given to the cultivation in that 
city of the natural sciences, and Mitchill, 
Lecoute, Cooper, De Kay, and others con- 
tributed numerous articles to the pages of 
its Annals. Next, in 1834, the Boston So- 
ciety of Natural History was established, 
and soon popularized in the city of its 
home the several subjects of its preference, 
which till then had received comparatively 
little attention. Finally were successively 
established in Albany, San Francisco, St. 
Louis, Chicago, Buffalo, Washington, and 
other cities, active societies devoted to sci- 
ence in several or all of its branches, which 
have in each case exercised a healthy influ- 
ence in their several spheres. 

All the societies specially noticed have 
not only continued to live, but are more 
active now than ever. Their inception co- 
incided with the awakened activity in the 
several cities where they are located, and 
thus mark distinct epochs of progress. 

Besides these local societies, two nation- 
al ones, the American Association for the 
Advancement of Science and the National 
Academy of Sciences, have accomplished 



important results. The Smithsonian Insti- 
tution, established at Washington in 1846, 
by its policy of facilitating intercommuni- 
cation between the learned societies and 
individuals of this and other countries, of 
seconding the efforts of investigators by col- 
lection of materials and publishing the re- 
sults of such investigations, and in other 
ways, greatly increased the means for the 
pursuit of the natural as well as mathemat- 
ical sciences. To a large extent, too, it has 
been intrusted by the government of the na- 
tion with a superintendence of scientific ex- 
ploration, and has done much thus to direct 
expenditure for such purposes in a proper 
channel. 

In this connection may be fitly noticed a 
journal which is not the organ of any soci- 
ety, but which has, perhaps, exerted more 
influence on the progress of science in this 
country than any other. This is the Amer- 
ican Journal of Science and Arts, commenced 
by the elder Silliman in 1818 in New Haven, 
and uninterruptedly continued there to the 
present time by him or members of his fam- 
ily. Its pages are replete with original and 
copied articles on the natural as well as the 
other sciences, and furnish in themselves 
an epitome of the progress of science in 
America. 

GENERAL EXPLORATIONS. 

The general government early adopted 
the policy of sending, from time to time, 
expeditious to the comparatively unknown 
portions of the country for their explora- 
tion, and with these in many cases natural- 
ists were connected. Only those most not- 
able from a scientific point of view can be 
referred to. In 1804-6 Lewis and Clarke 
traversed the continent, and more or less in- 
telligibly indicated previously undescribed 
species of animals from the far West, which 
were subsequently incorporated by Ord, 
Rafinesque, and others into the zoological 
system. In 1819-20 S. H. Long (then ma- 
jor) conducted an expedition to the Rocky 
Mountains, of which Edwin James was the 
historian (1823), and also detailed the geol- 
ogy and botany, while Say described the 
new animals, and Torrey enumerated the 
plants. In 1848, and again in 1852-53, Fre- 
mont led expeditions across the continent, 
and brought back new riches in botany and 



340 



SCIENTIFIC PKOGRESS. 



geology. In 1849 and 1850 Stansbury ex- 
plored the Great Salt Lake basin ; in 1852 
Sitgreaves the Zuni and Colorado rivers; 
and, also in 1852, Marcy the Red River of 
Louisiana. All of these expeditions were 
accompanied by energetic collectors, who 
brought back from the regions in question, 
whose natural history had been previously 
almost unknown, many new species, which 
were described and illustrated by natural- 
ists mostly withiu the walls of the Smithso- 
nian Institution. In 1854-56 General Emory 
(then major of cavalry) and Senor Salazar, 
as commissioners of their respective gov- 
ernments, surveyed and determined on the 
boundary line between the United States 
and Mexico. The United States commis- 
sion was accompanied by a corps of scien- 
tists ; and the report, published in 1857-59, 
contained most valuable contributions, rich- 
ly illustrated, on the zoology, botany, pale- 
ontology, and geology of the country sur- 
veyed. 

But all these must yield in importance to 
the several expeditions which were sent out 
by the War Department, under the auspices 
of the Bureau of Topographical Engineers, 
for " explorations and surveys to ascertain 
the most practicable and economical route 
for a railroad from the Mississippi River to 
the Pacific Ocean." These expeditions were 
mostly prosecuted from 1853 to 1856, and 
were conducted nearly on the parallels of 
latitude : (1) the 47th ; (2) the 38th and 39th ; 
(3) the 35th ; (4) the California line ; (5) the 
32d, (6) under Parke, and (7) under Pope; 
and (8) the California and Oregon line. All 
these parties had naturalists attached, and 
as the natural history of the Pacific slope 
was almost unknown, a very large propor- 
tion of the species brought home for exam- 
ination were new. These were reported 
upon by the naturalists of the surveys, but 
more fully elaborated by Professor S. F. 
Baird and Dr. Charles Girard. The results 
were published under a common title in a 
uniform series of twelve volumes in quarto. 
Professor Baird undertook the great task of 
revising, in connection with the new forms 
studied by himself, all the existing material 
from every part of North America. The 
fruits of his researches were issued in two 
very large volumes, respectively describing 
the mammals and birds of North America, in 



which the species were subjected to a crit- 
ical examination ; and for the first time 
those classes were completely and systemat- 
ically exhibited according to their affinities, 
detailed descriptions given of all the species 
and successively including groups, and clear 
synoptical tables added. The fishes collect- 
ed by the expeditions were elucidated chief- 
ly by Girard and Suckley. Plates were pub- 
lished of the reptiles, under the direction of 
Baird ; the coleoptera were partially report- 
ed upon by Leconte, and the mollusca by 
Cooper ; the plants were catalogued and de- 
scribed by Torrey, Gray, Engelmann, New- 
berry, aud others ; the paleontology was in- 
vestigated by Hall, Conrad, Agassiz, etc. ; 
and the geology by the several geologists 
of the survey. 

Two other surveys undertaken by the Bu- 
reau of Engineers should be noticed in this 
connection. One was the United States 
geological survey of the 40th parallel, pros- 
ecuted under the charge of Mr. Clarence 
King in 1867, 1868, and 1869; the other a 
geographical and topographical survey of 
certain of the Western and Southern Terri- 
tories, under Lieutenant George M.Wheeler, 
still in progress. Both have doue much for 
the furtherance of our knowledge of the 
zoology and botany, as well as the topog- 
raphy and geology, of the sections explored. 

Under the Department of the Interior a 
geological and geographical survey also 
originated in 1869, and gradually developed 
into importance, under the charge of Dr. F. 
V. Hayden ; and recently a second division 
of the same, with Professor J. W. Powell at 
its head, has been added to it. These vie 
with the other surveys in adding informa- 
tion respecting the physical geography and 
life, past and present, of the Territories un- 
der the government. 

The geological survey of the State of Cal- 
ifornia, under the superintendence of Pro- 
fessor J. D. Whitney (1861-74), also merits 
special notice on account of the complete- 
ness of its organization and the ability of 
execution of the work undertaken. 

While the knowledge of the natural his- 
tory of our country was being thus made 
known, that of foreign lands likewise re- 
ceived attention from American naturalists. 
During the years 1838-48 an exploring expe- 
dition was engaged, under the command of 



MINERALOGY. 



341 



Admir,. s (then Captain) Wilkes, in a voyage 
of circumnavigation, and in the course of its 
long cruise visited several countries whose 
natural productions and features were al- 
most or wholly unknown. The expedition 
was accompanied hy several energetic and 
accomplished naturalists, chief of whom in 
labors was the versatile Dana. The results 
of these explorations were most satisfactory, 
numerous new species were collected, and 
the publications on the collections were, as 
a whole, in the highest degree creditable to 
American science. The mammals and birds 
were reported on by Peale and Cassin ; the 
reptiles, by Girard ; the mollusks, by Gould ; 
the crustaceans and zoophytes, by Dana; the 
botany, by Torrey, Gray, Eaton, etc. ; and the 
geology of the countries visited, by Dana. 
The most noteworthy of these were the vol- 
umes on crustaceans and polyps, wherein 
the classification of those animals was en- 
tirely revised, and a great mass of new ma- 
terial added. 

In the years 1849-52 a " United States Na- 
val Astronomical Expedition to the Southern 
Hemisphere" was for the most part station- 
ed in Chili, and the commander thereof (Cap- 
tain J. M. Gilliss) and his assistants paid zeal- 
ous attention to the natural history of the 
regions traversed. Collections were made 
in the various departments, and on the re- 
turn of the expedition were studied by Baird, 
Cassin, Girard, Gould, Gray, Wyman, Conrad, 
J. Lawrence Smith, etc. The collection rich- 
est in new forms was of the class of fishes, 
of which some remarkable new types were 
described by Girard. 

An expedition which was excelled by none, 
if it did not, indeed, surpass all, in the col- 
lections amassed sailed from New York in 
1853 for the Northern Pacific, and for about 
four years cruised in all the great seas, at 
first under the command of Captain Ring- 
gold, and afterward under Captain Rodgers. 
In this expedition Mr. Wright was attached 
as botanist, and Mr. Stimpson as zoologist. 
The collections made, especially in the de- 
partment of zoology, were very large. Mr. 
Stimpson for the first time dredged in many 
of the harbors visited, and the results, as 
might be expected, were very rich. Numer- 
ous remarkable types of marine as well as 
other animals were thus discovered. These 
were partially described in preliminary re- 



ports by Stimpson, Cassin, Hallowell, Cope, 
and Gill, but the final reports were never 
published, and several of them, with the 
original illustrations, were consumed in the 
great fire which destroyed Chicago, and the 
loss thus incurred is irretrievable. 

Such are the principal explorations which 
have been instrumental in the extension of 
our knowledge of nature. Numerous others 
have concurred, but limited space forbids 
any mention of them. We may now best 
inquire how each department has been for- 
warded by American naturalists, commen- 
cing with the most simple, and advancing 
to the most complex. 

MINERALOGY. 

Linnaeus applied the same system of no- 
menclature to the mineral kingdom, or lapi- 
deum regnum, as he did to the animal and 
vegetable, dividing it into three " classes" — 
petrce, or stones ; minerce, or minerals; fossilia, 
or fossils ; and this exposition alone will give 
a good idea of the imperfect conception then 
entertained of the relations of those objects, 
and especially of the last. Chemistry and 
crystallography were almost ignored, or 
made use of in a very crude manner. More 
than any of his predecessors, however, Lin- 
naeus availed himself of the crystallograph- 
ic characters of minerals in their diagnoses ; 
but their action when subject to friction, 
fire, and acids was the chief means of de- 
termination used. Linnaeus was, however, 
much surpassed as a mineralogist by con- 
temporary investigators, and the status of 
mineralogy became rapidly improved by the 
discoveries of chemists, physicists, and crys- 
tallographers, and it had assumed the dig- 
nity of a science before any native Amer- 
icans applied themselves with intelligent 
zeal to the study. 

It is true that the occurrences at various 
places of certain minerals and peculiar con- 
ditions of some were noted from time to 
time, but nothing which deserves special 
notice was published for a long time. A 
journal professedly devoted to mineralogy, 
the American Miner alofjical Journal, was, in- 
deed, commenced by A. Bruce, but was dis- 
continued with the first volume. In 1816, 
however, Professor Parker Cleveland pub- 
lished An Elementary Treatise on Mineralogy 
and Geology, whose science was respectable 



# 



342 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



for its day, and gained a demand for a sec- 
ond edition in 1822. In 1832 appeared the 
first, and in 1835 the second, parts of Shep- 
ard's Treatise on Mineralogy. This was soon 
succeeded by a work which was destined to 
become the opus magnum of the science, A 
System of Mineralogy, by James D. Dana. It 
has passed through five entirely revised edi- 
tions, and several are, to all intents and pur- 
poses, distinct works, and fairly exemplify 
the several stages of science. In the first 
(1837) the system of nomenclature intro- 
duced by Linnaeus was retained, and a 
modification of the so-called natural clas- 
sification by Mobs, proposed several years 
previously (in 1833), was adopted. This 
system was based chiefly on the considera- 
tion of the superficial characters of the min- 
erals, but which were claimed to be true co- 
ordinates of the chemical, upon the superior 
value of which many mineralogists had al- 
ready insisted. In the second edition (1844) 
the same system of classification, with some 
modifications, was retained, but another, 
"placing the minerals under the principal 
element in their composition," was added. 
In the third edition (1850) the old system 
of nomenclature and classification was dis- 
carded, and the author adopted a provision- 
al system in which the chemical constitution 
of the mineral was taken more cognizance 
of, the chief aim, however, being to " serve 
the convenience of the student for easy ref- 
erence and for the study of mineralogy in 
its economical bearings, while at the same 
time it should exhibit many natural rela- 
tions, and inculcate no false applications or 
distinctions of species." A more rigid chem- 
ical classification, in which the Berzelian 
method was coupled with crystallography, 
was appended. In the fourth edition (1854) 
the arrangement appended iu the previous, 
amplified and corrected, was adopted as the 
regular system. In the fifth and last (1868) 
the same method was essentially retained, 
and in obedience to the necessities imposed 
by the more detailed study of the subject, 
and to show the proper subordination of the 
several characteristics, varieties were recog- 
nized. 

In the course of time the demands on the 
other branches of science in behalf of min- 
eralogy had become greater and greater. 
As we have seen, originally mineralogy was 



simply the art of identifying mineral forms 
by reference to their superficial physical 
characteristics. Gradually the chemist was 
called upon to tell the constitutions thereof; 
the crystallographer and mathematician to 
define and classify their forms ; the physi- 
cist to answer various questions as to char- 
acteristics ; the spectroscopist to aid the 
chemist. Finally the chemist was accord- 
ed the rank of prime arbiter, and in most 
cases his judgment is now accepted as final. 
In each of these departments America has 
had and still has most distinguished inves- 
tigators. Dana's work stands facile princeps 
among mineralogical text -books, and is a 
true " manual" in the Old World as well as 
in the New. He ranks pre-eminent in the 
special department of crystallography. In 
chemical mineralogy there have been many 
successful students, chief of whom are T. 
Sterry Hunt, George J. Brush, F. A. Genth, 
C. M. Shepard, and B. Silliinau. A son of 
Professor Dana (Mr. E. S. Dana) has, with 
scarcely unequal skill, begun to continue 
the work so well commenced by the father, 
and has been paying especial attention to 
the physical characters of minerals. 



Devotion to plants has been a favorite 
source of enjoyment to man. The attract- 
iveness of the objects, the positiveness and 
superficial concentration of characters, and 
the ease of preserving have all tended to 
this bias. As a natural result, to a certain 
extent the value and characteristics of 
plants were earlier appreciated than any 
other group of natural objects. Those of 
this country were tolerably well known at 
a comparatively early period. Jean Robin, 
a Frenchman, as early as 1620 published on 
the plants of old Virginia ; J. Cornuti, a 
French physician, in 1635, on those of Can- 
ada ; J. R. Forster in 1771 issued a Flora 
America; Septentrional is ; Cadwallader Col- 
den, of Newburgh, New York, communicated 
to Linnaeus a descriptive account of the 
plants indigenous to Orange County ; Mr. 
Cutler in 1785 published in the Memoirs 
of the American Academy of Arts and Sci- 
ences a catalogue of the New England spe- 
cies ; and numerous other works and articles 
of various degrees of merit were published 
(some meanwhile, but especially in succeed- 



BOTANY. 



343 



ing years), the most notable of which were 
the elder Michaux's Flora Borealis Ameri- 
cana (1803) ; Pursh's Flora America: Septentri- 
onalis (1814) ; and Eaton's Manual of Bot- 
any for the Northern and Middle States. In 
all of these and the minor contemporary 
productions the artificial sexual system of 
Linnaeus was adopted, and this had a won- 
derful hold on the affections of the older 
botanists. A man of remarkable versatility 
but disordered mind (C. S. Rafinesque), who 
had come to this country in 1814, had pub- 
lished much on botanical subjects, and had 
in several of his works suggested and par- 
tially carried into execution a quasi-natural 
scheme of classification ; but his influence 
had no weight, and not until the end of the 
last half century did any one of recognized 
standing discard the Linnaean method. In 
1823 Dr. John Torrey had published the first 
part of a Flora of the Northern and Middle 
States, in which he still retained the sexual 
system ; but having become satisfied of its 
incongruity with the existing state of sci- 
ence, he discontinued the work, and imme- 
diately after applied the natural system to 
the classification of the plants collected on 
Long's expedition to the far West, aud sub- 
sequently rendered it more popular by the 
publication of a catalogue of the North 
American genera, arranged in accordance 
with Lindley's classification (1831). Lewis 
Beck, in a Botany of the United Slates North 
of Virginia, also adopted this system. The 
natural system was thus fairly adopted by 
scientific botanists and those who appreci- 
ated the aims of science, but was long in ob- 
taining favor with the masses. The pub- 
lication of such works as the Flora of North 
America, by Torrey and Gray, in 1838-43, 
the Manual of the Flora of New York, by 
Torrey, in 1843, Manual of the Botany of the 
Northern United States, by Gray, in 1848, and 
kindred ones, however, procured its ultimate 
adoption even in manuals for schools and 
colleges. 

The States of the Atlantic sea-board and 
the Mississippi Valley were sedulously ex- 
plored by native botanists, and catalogues, 
and even extensive descriptive works, of 
the plants of many of the separate States, 
as well as sections, counties, and town- 
ships, were published. The expeditions that 
have been already alluded to in connection 



with natural history generally extended our 
knowledge of the flora of the extreme West, 
and the progress of botany advanced hand 
in hand with that of geography. Private 
collectors, too, devoted themselves to the 
search for the plants of various unexplored 
sections, and among these may be especially 
enumerated Fendler, who herborized in New 
Mexico ; Lindheimer, who collected in Texas ; 
Wright, Parry, and Vasey, who penetrated 
to divers places in the Southwestern sec- 
tions and Rocky Mountains ; and Rothrock, 
who has visited the extreme North (Alaska), 
and the furthest Southwest (Arizona). 

The monographers of groups have also 
been active. Above all must be mentioned 
Gray, Torrey, and Engelmann, and during 
later years Watson, who have studied vari- 
ous groups of phamoganis ; Eaton has espe- 
cially attached himself to the ferns ; Sulli- 
vant and Lesquereux to the mosses ; Curtis, 
of South Carolina, to the fungi ; Tucker- 
mann to the lichens ; and lately Dr. H. 
Wood has monographed our fresh -water 
algse, and Dr. Farlow has catalogued the 
marine species. 

The consideration of the geographical dis- 
tribution of plants has also engaged the at- 
tention of many students, and the researches 
of Gray demand especial notice. Pursh had 
as early as 1814 called attention to the sim- 
ilarity between the flora of North America 
and Northern Asia. Gray in 1846 pointed 
out many analogies, aud in 1856 insisted on 
the similarity between the floras of corre- 
sponding sides of the Old and New Worlds. 
He also at the same time recognized that, 
although the number of tropical types was 
much greater than in the northern portion 
of the Old World, " the peculiar and extra- 
European families do not predominate nor 
overcome the general European aspect of 
our vegetation." He has more recently rec- 
ognized a casual relation in this similarity, 
and contended that they indicated deriva- 
tion from a common source. 

ZOOLOGY. 

Although more or less pretentious lists of 
the animals of North America were given 
in many works descriptive of the country, 
scarcely any are worthy of notice, and so 
little was known of our species that an ex- 
tremely small percentage appeared in the 



344 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



Systema Natures of Linnaeus. The field in 
zoology is so vast that none have in this 
country attempted to do what has heen so 
well done for botany, that is, to prepare com- 
pendiums of descriptions of all the known 
species. From the complete dissimilarity 
and want of homologies between the great 
groups of the animal kingdom a peculiar 
terminology for each is entailed, and conse- 
quently the students are more specialists 
than in botany. Each group of animals, 
however, has had its devotees. The prog- 
ress in each, too, has, like that of botany, 
been to a considerable degree coincident 
with the growth of our geographical knowl- 
edge ; and this statement must serve in lieu 
of parti cularization in each case. The more 
difficult groups have been backward in at- 
tracting students, and the more pleasing 
types have received most attention. Thus 
the birds early excited the admiration of 
lovers of nature, and numerous works have 
been dedicated to the portraiture of their 
beauties, while the worms and other lower 
invertebrates have only lately attracted the 
notice science demanded. 

Before indicating the progress of our 
knowledge in the several branches of zool- 
ogy a notice of one who did much to shape 
the course which investigation took for 
some years may be fitly given. 

In 1846 Louis John Rudolph Agassiz vis- 
ited the country, and soon was induced to 
make it his home, and in 1848 accepted the 
chair of zoology and geology at Harvard 
College. Gifted with quick powers of per- 
ception and a remarkable memory for speci- 
mens, he had early applied himself to the 
study of fossil fishes, which till then had 
been nearly neglected. The publication of 
a very extensive and finely illustrated work 
gained for him a great reputation in Eu- 
rope. A peculiarly genial and impulsive 
disposition procured him the favor of those 
with whom he came into personal contact. 
This impression communicated itself quick- 
ly to others. He gathered around him a 
number of young men who were destined to 
pursue with distinguished success different 
branches of science. His prestige caused 
the ready acceptance of his teaching and 
principles by others, and insured their ap- 
plication to the various branches of zoolo- 
gy. Many of these principles were most 



sound; others (among them unfortunately 
were those most frequently applied) were 
less justified by scientific reason. Such 
were the views respecting the rigid limita- 
tions of species in time and area. He was 
also prone to differentiate genera because of 
minor differences, and to trust to intuition 
rather than to the inexorable logic of facts 
in the classification of data. His views were 
generally accepted, as well by amateurs as 
scientists, in this country, and not for a long 
time was there any strong counter-current. 
This subsequently set in, and the present 
tendency is toward a recognition of species 
with more variable limits, and with greater 
extension in time and space. But in spite 
of the drawbacks indicated the influence of 
Professor Agassiz was most salutary ; he 
raised the standard of scholarship looked 
for in the naturalist, incited general respect 
and even enthusiasm for natural science, 
and his popularity enabled him to found a 
Museum of Comparative Zoology which is 
an honor to Massachusetts and to the coun- 
try at large, and the best monument to his 
own zeal and learning. 

The United States presented long the 
anomalous position of being the only great 
nation which had no public museum. The 
collections that were brought back from 
time to time were, after the establishment 
of the Smithsonian Institution, intrusted to 
its custody, but only within a few years has 
it been recognized as a duty to appropriate 
at all adequate amounts for their preserva- 
tion and use. But some provision has been 
made for several years for a national muse- 
um ; this still remains as an appanage of the 
Smithsonian Institution, under the charge 
of its assistant secretary, Professor Baird, 
and now bids fair to soon rival the most 
important in Europe in the extent and act- 
ual value of its collections. 

The most notable accessions to our special 
knowledge have been as follows: 

Some of the more conspicuous quadrupeds 
of North America had been early described 
and figured in a recognizable manner by 
compilers and iconographers, and especially 
in the works of Catesby, Edwards, and Bris- 
son, and these were incorporated in the Sys- 
tema Naturae by Linnaeus ; but, all told, he 
only attributed twenty-five species to North 
America, and even of these he does not seem 



ORNITHOLOGY. 



345 



to have had autoptical knowledge of more 
than two or three. Others were subsequently 
made known, chiefly by English and French 
naturalists, aud later by Americans (espe- 
cially Say and Ord), and in 1825 Richard 
Harlan published a special volume on the 
class, in which were recognized 147 species, a 
number of which were, however, synonyms. 
Soon after (1826-28) John D. Godman is- 
sued a corresponding work, in three vol- 
umes, containing nothing new. Subsequent- 
ly Townsend and Audubon obtained from 
the West many new species, which were 
described by Bachman, and in 1846-54 Au- 
dubon and Bachman published a work on 
The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North Ameri- 
ca, in three volumes. Finally, in 1859, the 
great work by Professor Baird, already re- 
ferred to, appeared, and in this were de- 
scribed a number of previously unknown 
species, incorporated with others he had pre- 
viously made known. On the basis thus 
laid various zoologists have built. Among 
these have been the natural historians of 
various regions and the monographers of 
distinct groups, such as Harrison Allen, J. 
A. Allen, Cope, Coues, Gill, etc. 

The birds have excited the most lively 
interest, and the works published on the 
class have been many. The more common 
and conspicuous species were early intro- 
duced into the system, aud fi'om the time 
of John Bartram (1791) and Benjamin S. 
Barton (1799) to the present there have 
always been active students of the class 
in America. The most distinguished of 
these are Alexander Wilson, a native of 
Scotland, naturalized in the United States, 
who published in 1808-14 ; Charles L. Bo- 
naparte (a nephew of Napoleon, and aft- 
erward Prince of Musignano and Caniuo), 
who published, besides many other arti- 
cles, a complementary volume to Wilson's 
work (1825-33); T. Nuttall, who issued a 
Manual of the Ornithology of the United States 
and Canada (1832-34) ; J. J. Audubon, who 
contributed the most superbly illustrated 
work to ornithology that had up to that 
time been seen ; and S. F. Baird, who first 
(1858), in conjunction with J. Cassin and 
G. N. Lawrence, revised the entire system 
of North American birds, and very recently 
(1874), in union with T. Brewer and R. Ridg- 
way, has published the first three volumes 



of a work which surpasses all others in ac- 
curacy of description, philosophical breadth 
of views, and comparative valuation of 
characters. Lastly may be mentioned Birds 
of the Northwest: a Sand-Book of the Orni- 
thology of the Region drained by the Missouri 
Hirer and its Tributaries, by Elliott Coues 
(1874). 

While these general works were in course 
of publication, many minor works and arti- 
cles were printed on the general subject, on 
the species of limited regions, and on the 
modifications of structure and color induced 
by geographical and climatic causes, etc. 
The most successful students of the causes 
of geographical variation have been Baird, 
Allen, aud Ridgway. 

The reptiles and amphibians, although 
extremely unlike in structure, superficially 
resemble each other so closely as to have 
been always confounded together and stud- 
ied in common under the general head of 
herpetology. This has been a less culti- 
vated branch than others, but several emi- 
nent naturalists have elucidated our spe- 
cies, and more than either of the preceding 
classes has the present owed its advance- 
ment to natives. J. E. Holbrook, of South 
Carolina, published, in 1843, a North Ameri- 
can Herpetology, in five volumes, which was 
then unsurpassed by any similar production 
in Europe. S. F. Baird, Charles Girard, Ed- 
ward Hallowell, and Louis Agassiz have 
done eminent service on different groups, 
and more recently E. D. Cope has revised 
the entire herpetological fauna in connec- 
tion with the geueral system of reptiles and 
amphibians. 

The students of fishes have been more 
numerous. Iu the last century but little 
was known of these inhabitants of our wa- 
ters, and even that little was inexact. In 
1814 S. L. Mitchill, a man of great eminence 
in his day, published a valuable though 
crude memoir on the fishes of New York ; 
in 1839 D. H. Storer reported on the fishes 
of Massachusetts ; in 1842 J. E. De Kay pub- 
lished an important work on the fishes of 
New York ; and in 1855, and again in 1860, 
J. E. Holbrook commenced an illustrated 
work on the Icthyology of South Carolina, but 
suspended it with the first volume. 

The fishes of the extreme West and of the 
Pacific coast, almost absolutely unknown 



346 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



till 1854, were in that and in immediately- 
succeeding years described by Agassiz, Gi- 
rard, Ayres, etc. Among other cultivators 
of the science may be mentioned Kirtland, 
Baird, Brevoort, Gill, Putnam, Abbott, Cope, 
Bliss, Goode, Garnian, Milner, Yarrow, and 
Jordan. 

The invertebrates for purposes of study 
fall into two groups — the air-breathing in- 
sects and the marine forms. 

The insects soon attracted attention, and 
the various groups engaged active students. 
Say (1818 et seq.), Fitch, Packard, Walsh, 
and Riley have described species of almost 
every group. The coleoptera have been 
studied by Melsheimer, J. Leconte, Halde- 
mann, and above all by J. L. Leconte and 
Horn ; the lepidoptera have had numerous 
students — Morris, Clemens, Edwards, Pack- 
ard, Scudder, Grote, and many others; the 
hymenoptera, or groups thereof, have been 
examined by Norton, Saussure, etc. ; the or- 
thoptera have been investigated by Scud- 
der, Thomas, and Sydney Smith ; the neu- 
roptera by Hagen ; the hemiptera by Uhler ; 
and the diptera have engaged the attention 
of Loew and Osten-Sacken. The myriopods 
have been described by H. Wood, as have 
also the pedipalp arachnoids. 

The marine invertebrates were almost 
wholly neglected till Say, in 1818, com- 
menced his investigations, and for some 
years worked upon several of the groups, 
describing our most common crustaceans, 
shells, and other forms. A. A. Gould, in a 
work on the invertebrata of Massachusetts, 
made evident the paucity of our knowledge 
of all except the shells ; and a few years 
afterward (1851) W. Stimpson, then a very 
young man, commenced his researches, 
which added very largely to our informa- 
tion. In recent years the work thus com- 
menced has been worthily continued by the 
two Agassizes, H. J. Clarke, A. E. Verrilh 
S. Smith, O. Harger, and others. 

The mollusks, on account of the beauty 
of their shells and the ease of preserving 
them, have, like the birds, been favorite 
subjects for amateur students, and this has 
directly and indirectly accelerated our ac- 
quaintance with the species. The laborers 
have been very many. It must suffice to 
name, besides the general students of inver- 
tebrates previously referred to, Isaac Lea, 



A. A. Gould, Amos and William G. Binney, 
Thomas Bland, Edward S. Morse, William 
H. Dall, and George W. Tryon. These have 
studied, some all the groups, others the land 
or fresh-water shells, others the anatomy, 
and still others have especially considered 
the problems connected with their geo- 
graphical distribution. 

PALEONTOLOGY. 

In no department of natural history has 
progress been so distinctly marked, or the 
revelations so interesting and unexpected, 
as in that which takes cognizance of the 
former life of our globe. The science of 
paleontology, as this branch has been named, 
had absolutely no existence or name when 
the United States became a nation. Fossils 
were classified by Linnaeus not with ani- 
mals or plants, but with minerals. Their 
nature was then in doubt. By some they 
were supposed to be sports of nature, or 
abortive simulacra of what the Deity des- 
tined afterward to create. By the best in- 
formed and orthodox they were believed to 
be witnesses of the Noachian deluge. In a 
number of cases their nature was, indeed, 
recognized, but by none was it definitely 
realized that most fossils were the remains 
of forms that are no longer living. Although 
this truth became apparent to several at 
nearly the same time, Cuvier was the first 
to render it clear and popular by the resto- 
ration of numerous fossil remains of the 
skeletons of mammals found in the terti- 
ary deposits of the neighborhood of Paris. 
These were so demonstrably different from 
any animals that were known in a living 
state, and the improbability of their hav- 
ing remained undiscovered if still living 
was so extreme, that conviction of the 
truth necessarily struck every one who 
considered the evidence. The clew thus 
gained, although at first imperfectly held, 
was soon firmly grasped and followed by 
many interested students, and the pres- 
ent assured superstructure has been the 
reward of their zeal. In this country the 
science engaged the attention of many, 
and Say, Lesueur, De Kay, and Greene were 
among the earliest. Morton, Conrad, Lea, 
Hall, Meek, Gabb, White, and Whitfield, 
besides many others, have described and 
identified the fossil invertebrates. Hall 



GEOLOGY. 



347 



has especially published a noble work on 
the fossils of the paleozoic formations of 
New York. Meek has done more than 
any one else to illustrate the fossils of the 
carboniferous and mesozoic beds of the 
West; and Conrad has excelled in knowl- 
edge of and labors on the species of the 
tertiary rocks. Lea and Gabb have effi- 
ciently supplemented the works of the last 
two. 

The vertebrates have received attention 
from another class of scientists. For their 
comprehension an exact knowledge of the 
details of comparative osteology was req- 
uisite, and the students have, therefore, 
been comparatively few. De Kay, Harlan, 
Godniau, Hays, Cooper, Redfield, Warren, 
and Wyman simultaneously or successively 
touched the subject, but the great labors 
have been accomplished by Leidy, Cope, 
and Marsh. It had by some become sup- 
posed that America would furnish no de- 
posits of fossil bones such as had been dis- 
covered in Europe, but in 1846 and 1847 Dr. 
Hiram A. Prout, of St. Louis, and in 1847 
Dr. Leidy, published communications on re- 
mains found in the Mauvaise Terres of the 
then Territory of Nebraska, and those de- 
posits have since been a fruitful source of 
new discoveries. Other regions containing 
analogous deposits were subsequently made 
known, and the mammalian faunas of past 
times, pliocene, miocene, and eocene, have 
become tolerably well known. Among the 
most interesting of the types discovered are 
many forming "connecting links" between 
the existing ruminants (cattle, deer, etc.) 
and hog-like animals first made known by 
Leidy ; others lessening the interval be- 
tween the proboscidians and ordinary pach- 
yderm ungulates, discovered by Cope and 
Marsh ; others demonstrating the liue of 
descent of the horses of the present day, 
elucidated by Marsh ; and still others estab- 
lishing the former existence in North Amer- 
ica of animals most nearly related among 
living forms to the lemurs of Madagascar, 
as Marsh was the first to clearly demon- 
strate. Numerous other almost equally im- 
portant discoveries have been made, illus- 
trating the structure and range in time and 
biological generalizations for almost every 
group of vertebrates; but this is not the 
place to recount them. 



GEOLOGY. 

Geology is almost entirely the child of 
the present century. Its foundations were 
chiefly laid by Werner, of Freyberg (after 
1775), and his school in the clear recogni- 
tion of the nature and the relations of rocks 
to each other, and their distribution; by 
Hutton, of Edinburgh (1788), in the compre- 
hension of the origin and natural causes of 
the strata and rocks, and in the limitation 
of cataclysmal agencies; and by William 
Smith, an English surveyor (1790), and Cu- 
vier (1808), in a general perception of the re- 
striction of fossils to definite horizons, and 
the value of those fossils in determining the 
relative age of the strata in which they were 
imbedded. In each case, indeed, these had 
been to some extent anticipated in their dis- 
coveries, but their ideas were clear and pos- 
itive, while their predecessors failed to rec- 
ognize the full significance of the facts in 
question. The age had also become ripe to 
apply the truths thus perceived. 

Nothing worthy of mention was done for 
the geology of North America till William 
Maclure (a pupil of Werner), in 1806, came 
to this country and undertook a geological 
survey, traveling in the prosecution of this 
self-imposed task from our Northern border 
to the Gulf of Mexico. He was engaged on 
it for about three years, and in 1809 pub- 
lished the first geological map, and a com- 
mentary thereon in a special memoir. As 
was to be expected, he adopted the Wer- 
nerian system of nomenclature, and having 
been unable to apply paleontological evi- 
dence, his work exhibited little more than 
certain points in structural geology. Lard- 
ner Vanuxem (1828) first availed himself suc- 
cessfully of paleontology for the determina- 
tion of the age of several of our formations 
and their approximate synchronism with 
European beds. The natural history survey 
of the State of New York, commenced in 1836, 
brought together a great mass of facts, and 
by the concert of the several geologists and 
paleontologists, but especially guided by 
the judgment of Vanuxem and James Hall, 
a classification of the rocks on sound pale- 
ontological principles was instituted, which, 
as since perfected by Hall, has been adopted 
as the standard of reference for the pale- 
ozoic rocks of the United States and Brit- 
ish North America. Henry D. Rogers, in his 



348 



SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 



filial report on the geology of Pennsylvania 
(1858), made evident the skill with which he 
had disentangled the complications of the 
geological structure of the Alleghany sys- 
tem. F. B. Meek during a long series of years 
has acted as the universally accepted ar- 
biter for the determination of the age of the 
groups of rocks in the far West. Meanwhile 
the details of the geology of the various ge- 
ographical sections and States engaged the 
attention of many laborers, and one after 
the other almost every State instituted a 
geological survey, and many of them under- 
took at intervals two or more. In the order 
of first publication of results they are as 
follows : 1824, North Carolina ; 1826, South 
Carolina ; 1832, Massachusetts ; 1834, Mary- 
land ; 1835, Tennessee ; 1836, New Jersey, 
New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia ; 
1837, Connecticut, Maine ; 1838, Indiana, 
Michigan ; 1839, Delaware, Kentucky ; 1840, 
Rhode Island ; 1841, New Hampshire ; 1845, 
Vermont ; 1850, Alabama ; 1853, California, 
Illinois ; 1854, Mississippi, Wisconsin ; 1855, 
Missouri ; 1858, Arkansas, Iowa ; 1859, Tex- 
as ; 1865, Kansas ; 1866, Minnesota ; 1869, 
Louisiana ; 1875, Georgia. 

The general government also from time 
to time instituted special geological sur- 
veys, independent of the exploring parties 
mentioned in the first part of this article. 
In 1834 and 1835 G. W. Featherstonhaugh 
investigated the elevated country between 
the Missouri and Red rivers and the Wiscon- 
sin Territory. At various times D. D. Owen 
conducted surveys in several States and 
Territories of the Northwest, publishing the 



chief results in 1844, 1848, and 1852. In 
1869 the persistent solicitations of F. V. 
Hayden, already well known as a field ge- 
ologist and collector, secured a geological 
survey of Nebraska, under the auspices of 
the Land-office, a bureau of the Interior 
Department. For two years this was prose- 
cuted, and the wedge having been thus driv- 
en, the survey was continued, and, organized 
under a more ample scope and with enlarged 
designs, is continued to the present time. 
A number of eminent men have availed 
themselves of the means of investigation 
and publication presented to them by the 
survey, and consequently a number of val- 
uable publications have appeared under its 
auspices. Also productive of similar work 
have been, or are, the surveys of the 40th 
parallel, and the Territories west of the 
100th meridian, already referred to under 
the head of general natural history. 

In every department of geology America 
has exhibited efficient works. Stratigraph- 
ical, chronological, dynamical, and mineral- 
ogical geologies have each had its votaries, 
and so numerous have they been that the 
simple mention of their names is precluded. 

Such are the principal incidents of prog- 
ress in the knowledge of the natural history 
of our land. Many important discoveries 
have not been even alluded to, and the lim- 
itations of space preclude notice of the ad- 
vance of anthropological science and the 
general propositions and principles of biol- 
ogy to which American naturalists have 
contributed. 



XII. 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



IN a retrospect of what has been done in 
American literature during the past hun- 
dred years, it is of the first importance to 
draw a sharp line of distinction between 
the mental powers displayed in literature 
and those which have been exhibited in in- 
dustrial creation, in statesmanship, and in 
the abstract and applied sciences. The lit- 
erature of America is but an insufficient 
measure of the realized capacities of the 
American mind. When Sir William Ham- 
ilton declared that Aristotle had an imag- 
ination as great as that of Homer, he struck 
at the primary fact that the creative ener- 
gies of the human mind may be exercised 
in widely different lines of direction. Im- 
agination is, in the popular mind, obstinate- 
ly connected with poetry and romance. This 
prejudice is further deepened by associating 
imagination with amiable emotions, regard- 
less of the fact that two of the greatest char- 
acters created by the human imagination 
are two of the vilest types of intelligent 
nature — Iago and Mephistopheles. When 
the attempt is made to extend the applica- 
tion of the creative energy of imagination 
to business and politics, the sentimental out- 
cry against such a profanation of the term 
becomes almost deafening. Every poetaster 
is willing to admit that Newton is one of 
the few grand scientific discoverers that the 
world has produced; but he still thinks that, 
in virtue of versifying some commonplaces 
of emotion and thought, he is himself supe- 
rior to Newton in imagination. The truth 
is that, in spite of Newton's incapacity to 
appreciate works of literature and art, he 
possessed a creative imagination of the first 
class — an imagination which, in boundless 
fertility, is second only to Shakspeare's. In 
fact, it is the direction given to the creative 
faculty, and not to the materials on which 
it works, that discriminates between Ful- 
ton and Bryant, Whitney and Longfellow, 
Bigelow and Whittier, Goodyear and Lowell. 
Descending from the inventors, it would be 
easy to show that in the conduct of the ev- 
ery-day transactions of life, more quickness 



of imagination, subtilty and breadth of un- 
derstanding, and energy of will have been 
displayed by our men of business than by 
our authors. By the necessities of our po- 
sition, the aggregate mind of the country 
has been exercised in creating the nation 
as we now find it. There is, indeed, some- 
thing ludicrous, to a large observer of all 
the phenomena of our national life, in con- 
founding the brain and heart of the United 
States with the manifestation that either 
has found in mere literary expression. The 
nation outvalues all its authors, even in re- 
spect to those powers which authors are sup- 
posed specially to represent. Nobody can 
write intelligently of the progress of Ameri- 
can literature during the past hundred years 
without looking at American literature as 
generally subsidiary to the grand movemeut 
of the American mind. 

It is curious, however, that the only ap- 
parent contradiction to this general princi- 
ple dates from the beginning of our national 
life./ At the time the American Revolution 
broke out, the two men who best represent- 
ed the double aspect of the thought of the 
colonies were Jonathan Edwards and Ben- 
jamin Franklin. Both come within the do- 
main of the historian of literature, for both 
were great forces in our literature, whose 
influence is yet unspent. Of Jonathan Ed- 
wards, the greatest of American theologians 
and metaphysicians, and a religious genius 
of the first order, it is impossible to speak 
without respect, and even reverence. No 
theologian born in our country has exer- 
cised more influence on minds and souls 
kindred to his own. Those who opposed 
him recognized his pre-eminent powers of 
intellect. Every body felt, in assailing 
such a consummate reason er, the restrain- 
ing modesty which a master-spirit always 
evokes in the minds of his adversaries. His 
treatise on the Will has been generally ac- 
cepted as one of the marvels of intellectual 
acuteness, exercised on one of the most dif- 
ficult problems which have ever tested the 
resources of the human intellect. There 



350 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



have been many answers to it, but no an- 
swer which is generally considered unan- 
swerable. Such works, indeed, as this of 
Edwards on the Will are not so much an- 
swered or refuted as gradually outgrown. 
But the treatise has certainly exercised and 
strengthened all the minds that have reso- 
lutely grappled with it, and has aided the 
development of the logical powers of Amer- 
ican orthodox divines in a remarkable de- 
gree. Whether a controversialist agrees 
with its author, or dissents from him, Ed- 
wards always quickens tbe mental activity 
of every body who strives to follow the 
course of his argumentation, or to detect 
the lurking fallacy which is supposed to be 
discoverable somewhere in the premises or 
processes of his logic. Perhaps this fallacy 
is to be found in the various senses in which 
Edwards uses the vital word " determina- 
tion." To most readers, who believe the 
will to be abstractly free, but that the ac- 
tions of men commonly proceed from the 
characters they have gradually formed, the 
most satisfactory explanation of the mys- 
tery is that of Jouffroy, who declares that 
" Liberty is the ideal of the Me." Others 
may obtain consolation from Gilfillan's some- 
what flippant remark, that every thing a 
man does is not necessary before he does it, 
but is necessary after he has done it. Es- 
sentially the doctrine of Edwards agrees 
with that of philosophical necessity, and 
with that so vehemently urged by many 
scientists, that the actions of men are as 
much controlled by law as the movements 
of the planets. The great difference be- 
tween Edwards's theory and the others is, 
that he connects his metaphysics with a 
theological system, and his treatise remains 
as a kind of practical argument for the ev- 
erlasting damnation of those who question 
the infallibility of its logic. 

Edwards's large and subtle understand- 
ing was connected with an imagination of 
intense realizing power, and both were 
based on a soul of singular purity, open on 
many sides to communications from the Di- 
vine mind. He had an almost preternatu- 
ral conception of the "exceeding sinfulness 
of sin." His imagination was filled with 
ghastly images of the retribution which 
awaits on iniquity, and his reasoned ser- 
mons on eternal torments were but the out- 



break of a sensitive feeling, a holy passion 
for goodness, which made him intolerant of 
any excellence which did not approach his 
ideal of godliness. But then his spiritual ex- 
perience, though it inflamed one side of his 
imagination with vivid pictures of the ter- 
rors of hell, on the other side gave the most 
enrapturing visions of the spiritual joys of 
heaven. It is unfortunate for his fame that 
his hell has obtained for him more popular 
recognition than his heaven. Like other 
poets, such as Dante and Milton, his pictures 
of the torments of the damned have cast into 
the shade that celestial light which shines 
so lovingly over his pictures of the bliss of 
the redeemed. True religion, he tells us, 
consists in a great measure in holy affec- 
tions — in " a love of divine things for the 
beauty and sweetness of their moral excel- 
lency." " Sweetness" is a frequent word 
all through Edwards's works, when he de- 
sires to convey his perception of the satis- 
factions which await on piety in this world, 
and the ineffable joy of the experiences of 
pious souls in the next ; and this word he 
thrills with a transcendent depth of sug- 
gestive meaning which it bears in no dic- 
tionary, nor in the vocabulary of any other 
writer of the English language. He was 
certainly one of the holiest souls that ever 
appeared on the planet. The admiration 
which has been generally awarded to his 
power of reasoning should be extended to 
his power of affirming, that is, when he af- 
firms ideas coming from those moods of 
blessedness in which his soul seems to be 
in direct contact with divine things, and 
vividly beholds what in other discourses his 
mind reasons up to or about. To reach 
these divine heights, however, you must, 
according to Edwards, mount the stairs of 
dogma built by Augustine and Calvin. 

Jonathan Edwards may be characterized 
as a man of the next world. Benjamin 
Franklin was emphatically a man of this 
world. Not that Franklin lacked religion 
and homely practical piety, but he had none 
of Edwards's intense depth of religious ex- 
perience. God was to him a beneficent be- 
ing, aiding good men in their hard struggles 
with the facts of life, and not pitiless to 
those who stumbled in the path of duty, or 
even to those who widely diverged from it. 
The heaven of Edwards was as far above 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 



351 



his spiritual vision as the hell of Edwards 
was below his soundings of the profundities 
of human wickedness ; hut there never was 
a person who so swiftly distinguished an 
honest man from a rogue, or who was more 
quick to see that the rogue was at war with 
the spiritual constitution of things. He 
seems to have learned his morality in a 
practical way. All his early slips from the 
straight line of duty were hut experiments, 
from which he drew lessons in moral wis- 
dom. If he happened occasionally to lapse 
into vice, he made the experience of vice a 
new fortress to defend his virtue; and he 
came out of the temptations of youth and 
middle age with a character generally rec- 
ognized as one of singular solidity, serenity, 
and benignity. His intellect, in the beauti- 
ful harmony of its faculties, his conscience, 
in the instinctive sureness of its perception 
of the relations of duties, and his heart, in 
its subordination of malevolent to benefi- 
cent emotions — all showed how diligent he 
had been in the austere self-culture which 
eventually raised him to the first rank among 
the men of his time. Simplicity was the 
fine result of the complexities which enter- 
ed into his mind and character. He was a 
man who never used words except to ex- 
press positive thoughts or emotions, and 
was never tempted to misuse them for the 
purposes of declamation. He kept his style 
always on the level of his character. In 
announcing his scientific discoveries, as in 
his most private letters, he is ever simple. 
In breadth of mind he is probably the most 
eminent man that our country has pro- 
duced ; for while he was the greatest diplo- 
matist, and one of the greatest statesmen 
and patriots of the United States, he was 
also a discoverer in science, a benignant 
philanthropist, and a master in that r.Te 
art of so associating words with things that 
they appeared identical. Edwards repre- 
sents, humanly speaking, the somewhat 
doleful doctrine that the best thing a good 
man can do is to get out, as soon as he de- 
cently can, of this world into one which is 
immeasurably better, by devoting all his 
energies to the salvation of his own partic- 
ular soul. Franklin, on the contrary, seems 
perfectly content with this world, as long as 
he thinks he can better it. Edwards would 
doubtless have considered Franklin a child 



of wrath, but Francis Bacon would have 
hailed him as one of that band of explor- 
ers who, by serving Nature, will in the end 
master her mysteries, and use their knowl- 
edge for the service of man. Indeed, the 
cheerful, hopeful spirit which runs through 
Franklin's writings, even when he was tried 
by obstacles which might have tasked the 
proverbial patience of Job, is not one of the 
least of his claims upon the consideration 
of those who rightfully glory in having such 
a genius for their countryman. The spirit 
which breathes through Franklin's life and 
works is that which has inspired every pi- 
oneer of our Western wastes, every poor 
farmer who has tried to make both ends 
meet by the exercise of rigid economy, ev- 
ery inventor who has attempted to serve 
men by making machines do half the drudg- 
ery of their work, every statesman who has 
striven to introduce large principles into 
our somewhat confused and contradicto- 
ry legislation, every American diplomatist 
who has upheld the character of his coun- 
try abroad by sagacity in managing men, 
as well as by integrity in the main purpose 
of his mission, and every honest man who 
has desired to diminish the evil there is in 
the world, and to increase every possible 
good that is conformable to good sense. 
Franklin is doubtless our Mr. Worldly Wise- 
man, but his worldly wisdom ever points to 
the Christian's prayer that God's will shall 
be done on earth as it is done in heaven. 

One of the most ludicrous misinterpreta- 
tions of this large, bounteous, and benignant 
intelligence is that which confines his influ- 
ence to the little corner of his mind in which 
he lodged " Poor Richard." It is common 
even now to hear complaints from opulent 
English gentlemen that Franklin has done 
much to make the average American nar- 
row in mind, hard of heart, greedy of small 
gains, mean in little economies. This is 
said of a nation the poorer portions of 
whose population are needlessly wasteful, 
and whose richer portions astonish Europe 
annually by the profusion with which they 
scatter dollars to the right and the left. 
The maxims of Poor Richard are generally 
good, and the more they are circulated, the 
more practical good they will do ; for our 
countrymen are remarkable rather for vio- 
lating than for obeying them. In all these 



352 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



criticisms on Franklin, however, it is strange 
that few have observed what a delicious 
specimen of humorous characterization he 
has introduced into literature in his charm- 
ing delineation of Poor Richard. The. ef- 
fect is heightened by the groaning, droning 
way in which the good man delivers his bits 
of wisdom, as if he despairingly felt that the 
rustics around him would disregard his ad- 
vice and monitions, and pass through the 
usual experiences of the passions, insensible 
to the gasping, croaking voice which warn- 
ed them in advance. 

Franklin is probably the best specimen 
that history affords of what is called a self- 
made man. He certainly " never worship- 
ed his maker," according to Mr. Clapp's 
stinging epigram, but was throughout his 
life, though always self- respectful, never 
self-conceited. Perhaps the most notable 
result of his self- education was the ease 
with which he accosted all grades and class- 
es of men on a level of equality. The print- 
er's boy became, in his old age, one of the 
most popular men in the French court, not 
only among its statesmen, but among its 
frivolous nobles and their wives. He ever 
estimated men at their true worth or worth- 
lessness; but as a diplomatist he was a 
marvel of sagacity. The same ease of man- 
ner which recommended him to a Pennsyl- 
vania farmer was preserved in a conference 
with a statesman or a king. He ever kept 
his eud in view in all his complaisances, 
and that end was always patriotic. When 
he returned to his country he was among 
the most earnest to organize the liberty he 
had done so much to achieve ; and he also 
showed his hostility to the system of ne- 
gro slavery with which the United States 
was accursed. At the ripe age of eighty- 
four he died, leaving behind him a record 
of extraordinary faithfulness in the per- 
formance of all the duties of life. His sa- 
gacity, when his whole career is surveyed, 
amounts almost to saintliness; for his sa- 
gacity was uniformly devoted to the accom- 
plishment of great public ends of policy or 
beneficence. 

Edwards was born three years before 
Franklin, and died in 1758, nearly twenty 
years before the war broke out. Franklin 
died in 1790. Both being representative 
men, may properly be taken as points of 



departure in considering those writers and 
thinkers who were educated under the in- 
fluences of the pre-Revolutionary period of 
our literary history. ^The writings of Wash- 
ington, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madi- 
son, Jay, are a recognized portion of our lit- 
erature, because the hoarded wisdom slowly 
gathered in by their practical knowledge of 
life crops out in their most familiar corre- 
spondence. A truism announced by such 
men brightens into a truth, because it has 
evidently been tested and proved by their 
experience in conducting affairs. There is 
an elemental grandeur in Washington's 
character and career which renders imper- 
tinent all mere criticism on his style; for 
what he was and what he did are felt to 
outvalue a hundredfold what he wrote, ex- 
cept we consider his writings as mere rec- 
ords of his sagacity, wisdom, patience, dis- 
interestedness, intrepidity, and fortitude. 
John Adams had a large, strong, vehement 
mind, interested in all questions relating to 
government. He was a personage of in- 
domitable individuality, large acquirements, 
quick insight, ^nd resolute civic courage ; 
but the storm and stress of public affairs 
gave to much of his thinking a character 
of intellectual irritation, rather than of sus- 
tained intellectual energy. His moral im- 
patience was such that he seems to fret as 
he thinks. Jefferson, of all our early states- 
men, was the most efficient master of the 
pen, and the most "advanced" political 
thinker. In one sense, as the author of the 
Declaration of Independence, he may be 
called the greatest, or, at least, the most 
generally known, of American authors. But 
in his private correspondence his literary 
talent is most displayed, for by his letters 
he built up a party which ruled the United 
States for nearly half a century, and which 
was, perhaps, only overturned because its 
opponents cited the best portions of Jeffer- 
son's writings against conclusions derived 
from the worsts In executive capacity he 
was relatively weak ; but his mistakes in 
policy and his feebleness in administra- 
tion, which would have ruined an ordinary 
statesman at the head of so turbulent a 
combination of irascible individuals as the 
Democratic party of the United States, were 
all condoned by those minor leaders of fac- 
tion who, yielding to the magic persuasive- 



THE "FEDERALIST." 



353 



ness of his pen, assured their followers that 
the great man could do no wrong. Read in 
connection with the events of his time, Jef- 
ferson's writings must be considered of per- 
manent value and interest. As a political 
leader he was literally a man of letters ; 
and his letters are masterpieces, if viewed 
as illustrations of the arts by which polit- 
ical leadership may be attained. In his 
private correspondence he was a model of 
urbanity and geniality. The whole im- 
pression derived from his works is that he 
was a better man than his enemies would 
admit him to be, and not so great a man as 
his partisans declared him to be. Few pub- 
lic men who have been assailed with equal 
fury have exhibited a more philosophical 
temper in noticing assailants. Though oc- 
casionally spiteful in his references to rivals, 
his leading fault, as a political leader, was 
not so much in being himself a libeler as in 
the protection he extended to libelers who 
lampooned men obnoxious to him. His 
own miud seems to have been singularly 
temperate ; but he had a marvelous tolera- 
tion for the intemperance of the rancorous 
defamers of Washington, Hamilton, and 
Adams. The Federalists hated him with 
such a mortal hatred, and showered on him 
such an amount of horrible invective, that 
he may have witnessed with a sarcastic 
smile the still coarser and fiercer calumnies 
which the band of assassins of character in 
his interest showered on the leading Feder- 
alists. Jefferson in this contest proved 
himself capable of malice as well as insin- 
cerity ; but in a scrutiny of his works it 
will be found that individually he had more 
amenity of temper than his opponents, for 
it must be remembered that in his political 
career he was stigmatized not only as the 
most wicked and foolish of politicians, bat 
as the sultan of a negro harem, and that 
every circumstance of his private life was 
malignantly misrepresented. Many emi- 
nent New England divines regarded him 
as an atheist as well as an anarchist, and 
thundered at him from their pulpits as 
though he was a new incarnation of the 
evil principle. Jefferson's comparative mod- 
eration, in view of the savage fierceness of 
the attacks on his personal, political, and 
moral character, must, on the whole, be 
commended ; but still his moderation cov- 
23 



ered a large amount of private intrigue, and 
a readiness to use underhand means to com- 
pass what he may have deemed beneficent 
ends. 

The names of Hamilton, Madison, and 
Jay are inseparably associated as the au- 
thors of the Federalist, the political classic 
of the United States. Of the essays it con- 
tains, Hamilton wrote fifty- one, Madison 
twenty-nine, and Jay five. It is generally 
considered that Hamilton's are the best. 
Indeed, Alexander Hamilton was, next to 
Franklin, the most consummate statesman 
among the band of emineut men who had 
been active in the Revolution, and who aft- 
erward labored to convert a loose confedera- 
tion of States into a national government. 
His mind was as plastic as it was vigorous 
and profound. It was the appropriate intel- 
lectual expression of a poised nature whose 
power was rarely obtrusive, because it was 
half concealed by the harmonious adjust- 
ment of its various faculties. It was a 
mind deep enough to grasp principles, and 
broad enough to regard relations, and fer- 
tile enough to devise measures. Indeed, 
the most practical of our early statesmen 
was also the most inventive. He was as 
ready with new expedients to meet unex- 
pected emergencies as he was wise in sub- 
ordinating all expedients to clearly defined 
principles. In intellect he was probably 
the most creative of our early statesmen, as 
in sentiment Jefferson was the most widely 
influential. And Hamilton was so bent on 
practical ends that he was indifferent to the 
reputation which might have resulted from 
a parade of originality in the means he de- 
vised for their accomplishment. There nev- 
er was a statesman less egotistic, less de- 
sirous of labeling a policy as " my" policy ; 
and one of the sources of his influence was 
the subtle way in which he insinuated into 
other minds ideas which they appeared to 
originate. His moderation, his self-com- 
mand, the exquisite courtesy of his man- 
ners, the persuasiveness of his ordinary 
speech, the fascination of his extraordinary 
speeches, and the mingled dignity and ease 
with which he met men of all degrees of in- 
tellect and character, resulted in making his 
political partisans look up to him as almost 
an object of political adoration. It is diffi- 
cult to say what this accomplished man might 



354 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



have done as a leader of the Federal oppo- 
sition to the Democratic administrations of 
Jefferson and Madison, had he not, in the 
maturity of his years and in the full vigor 
of his faculties, been murdered by Aaron 
Burr. Nothing can better illustrate the 
folly of the practice of dueling than the fact 
that, by a weak compliance with its max- 
ims, the most eminent of American states- 
men died by the hand of the most infamous 
of American demagogues. Certainly Hamil- 
ton had no need to accept a challenge in or- 
der to vindicate his claim to courage. That 
had been abundantly shown in the field, at 
the bar, in the cabinet, before the people. 
There was hardly any form of courage, 
military, civic, or moral, in which he had 
not proved that he was insensible to every 
kind of fear. The most touching expression 
of it was, perhaps, the confession he public- 
ly made that he had been entrapped into a 
guilty intrigue with a wily woman. The 
confession was necessary to vindicate his 
integrity as a statesman, assailed by rancor- 
ous enemies. In reading it one is impressed 
with the innate dignity of character which 
such a mortifying disclosure of criminal 
weakness could not essentially degrade ; 
and the allusion to his noble wife can hard- 
ly even now be read without tears. " This 
confession," he nobly says, " is not made 
without a blush. I can not be the apolo- 
gist of any vice because the ardor of pas- 
sion may have made it mine. I can never 
cease to condemn myself for the pang which 
it may inflict on a bosom eminently entitled 
to all my gratitude, fidelity, and love ; but 
that bosom will approve that, even at so 
great an expense, I should effectually wipe 
away a more serious stain from a name 
which it cherishes with no less elevation 
than tenderness. The public, too, I trust, 
will excuse the confession. The necessity 
of it to my defense against a more heinous 
charge could alone have extorted from me 
so painful an indecorum." 

John Jay, another of the wise statesmen 
of the Revolution, who survived to perform 
services of inestimable value to the new con- 
stitutional government, was a man whose 
character needs no apologists. Webster 
finely said that " the spotless ermine of the 
judicial robe, when it fell on the shoulders 
of John Jay, touched nothing not as spotless 



as itself." His integrity ran down into tho 
very roots of his moral being, and honesty 
was in him a passion as well as a principle. 
A great publicist as well as an incorrupti- 
ble patriot, with pronounced opinions which 
exposed him to all the shafts of faction, his 
most low-minded and venomous adversaries 
felt that both his private and public char- 
acter were unassailable. The celebrated 
"treaty" with Great Britain which he ne- 
gotiated as the minister of the United States 
occasioned an outburst of Democratic wrath 
such as few American diplomatists have 
ever been called upon to face; but in all 
the fury of the opposition to it, few oppo- 
nents were foolish enough to assail his integ- 
rity in assailing his judgment and general 
views of public policy. 

Judge Story once said that to James Mad- 
ison and Alexander Hamilton we were main- 
ly indebted for the Constitution of the Unit- 
ed States. It is curious that to Madison we 
are also mainly indebted for those Virginia 
"Resolutions of '98," which have been used 
to justify nullification and secession. With 
all his mental ability, Madison had not much 
original force of nature. He leaned now to 
Hamilton, now to Jefferson, and at last fell 
permanently under the influence of the gen- 
ius of the latter. He was lacking in that 
grand moral and intellectual impulse, un- 
derlying mere knowledge and logic, which 
distinguishes the man who reasons from the 
mere reasoner. His character was not on a 
level with his talents and acquirements ; his 
much-vaunted moderation came from the ab- 
sence rather than from the control of pas- 
sion ; and his understanding, though broad, 
was somewhat mechanical in its operations, 
and had no foundation in a corresponding 
breadth of nature. The "Resolutions of 
'98," which Southern Democrats came grad- 
ually to consider as of equal authority with 
the Constitution, were originally devised for 
a transient party purpose. The passage of 
the Alien and Sedition Laws, during the ad- 
ministration of John Adams, provoked Jef- 
ferson into writing a new "Declaration of 
Independence" — in this case directed not 
against Great Britain, but against the Unit- 
ed States. He drew up a series of resolu- 
tions, which he sent to one of his subagents, 
George Nicholas, of Kentucky, to be adopted 
by the Legislature of that State. They were, 



EARLY POETS. 



355 



with some omissions, passed. These resolu- 
tions substantially declared that the Federal 
Constitution was a compact between sover- 
eign States, and that in case of a supposed 
violation of the compact, each party to it, as 
in other cases of parties having no common 
judge, had " an equal right to judge for it- 
self, as well of infractions as of the mode 
and measure of redress." In a somewhat 
modified form, but still implicitly contain- 
ing tbe poison of nullification, similar reso- 
lutions, drafted by Madison, were passed by 
the Legislature of Virginia. The object 
evidently was to frighten the general gov- 
ernment by a threat of State resistance to 
its authority, without any settled purpose 
of nullification or rebellion. When Jeffer- 
son and Madison became successively Presi- 
dents of the United States, they seemed 
to have forgotten their " resolutions," ex- 
cept to express their horror when, seven- 
teen years afterward, a few mild Federal 
gentlemen, meeting at Hartford, appeared 
to show some vague intention of availing 
themselves of the precious constitutional 
doctrines which Jefferson and Madison had 
so boldly announced. The "Resolutions of 
'98" must be considered an important por- 
tion of our national literature, for they were 
exultingly adduced as the logical justifica- 
tion of the gigantic rebellion of 1861. It is 
rare, even in the history of political factions, 
that a string of cunningly written resolves, 
designed to meet a mere party emergency, 
should thus cost a nation thousands of mill- 
ions of treasure and hundreds of thousands 
of lives. 

When an armed ship has her upper deck 
cut down, and is thus reduced to an infe- 
rior class, it is said that she is "razeed." 
Fisher Ames may be called, on this princi- 
ple, a razeed Burke. Of all the Fedeial 
writers and speakers of his time, he bears 
away the palm of eloquence. He has some- 
thing of Burke's affluence of imagination, 
something of Burke's power of condensing 
political wisdom into epigrammatic apo- 
thegms, and more than Burke's hatred of 
" French principles ;" but he lacks the im- 
mense moral force of Burke's individuality, 
the large scope of his reason, the overwhelm- 
ing intensity of his passion. Still, his mer- 
its as a writer, when compared with those 
of most of his contemporaries, are so strik- 



ing that his countrymen seem unjust in al- 
lowing such an author to drop out of the 
memory of the nation. He was the despair- 
ing champion of a dying cause ; he decora- 
ted the grave of Federalism with some of 
the choicest flowers of rhetoric ; but the 
flowers are now withered, and the tomb it- 
self hardly receives its due meed of honor. 

The most eminent writers of the period 
which extends from 1776 to the first decade 
of the nineteenth century were either states- 
men or theologians. Between these the 
poets, essayists, and romancers occupy a com- 
paratively subordinate place ^ for we esti- 
mate the value of a literature', not so much 
by the character of the subjects with which 
it deals, as by the power of mind it evinces 
in dealing with them. As it regards our 
scholars and men of letters of that time, it 
must be remembered that the colonies were 
colonies of intellectual as well as of politic- 
al Britain, and that their ideals of intellect- 
ual excellence were formed on English mod- 
els. Our poets could only give a local color 
to a diction which was essentially that of 
Milton, or Dryden, or Pope, or Goldsmith, or 
Gray. They imitated these poets in a vain 
attempt to attain their elevation, simplicity, 
or compactness of style ; but in doing this 
they merely did what contemporary versifi- 
ers in London or Edinburgh were intent on 
doing. Their verse has not survived, but 
it is not more completely forgotten than 
the verse of Mason, and Hayley, and Henry 
James Pye. They could write heroic verse 
as well as most of the English imitators 
of Pope, and Pindaric odes as well as most 
of the English imitators of Gray. Indeed, 
the verses with which our forefathers af- 
flicted the world are generally not so bad 
as the verses of the poet laureates of En- 
gland, from the period when Dryden was 
deprived of the laurel, to the period when 
Southey reluctantly accepted it. Timothy 
Dwight, an eminent patriot and theologian, 
was early smitten with the ambition to be a 
poet. He wrote "America," " The Conquest 
of Canaan" (an epic), " Greenfield Hill," and 
" The Triumph of Infidelity." These poems 
are not properly subjects of criticism, because 
they are hopelessly forgotten, and no critical 
resurrectionist can give them that slight ap- 
pearance of vitality which would justify an 
examination of their merits and demerits. 



356 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



Yet they are reasonably good of their kind, 
and " Greenfield Hill," especially, contains 
some descriptions which are almost worthy 
to be called charming. Dwight, as a Latin 
scholar, occasionally felt called upon to show 
his learning in his rhymes. Thus in one of 
his poems he characterizes one of the most 
delightful of Roman lyrists as " desipient" 
Horace. After a diligent exploration of the 
dictionary, the reader finds that desipient 
comes from a Latin word signifying "to 
be wise," and that its English meaning is 
" trifling, foolish, playful." It might be sup- 
posed that in the whole range of English 
poetry there was no descriptive epithet so 
ludicrously pedantic ; but, fortunately for 
our patriotism, we can convict Dryden of a 
still greater sin against good taste. In Dry- 
den's first ode (1687) for St. Cecilia's Day we 
find the following lines : 

"Orpheus could lead the savage race, 
And trees uprooted left their place, 
Sequacious of the lyre." 

It can not be doubted that Timothy Dwight's 
" desipient" is as poetically justifiable as 
John Dryden's " sequacious." 

Perhaps ihe most versatile of our early 
writers of verse was Philip Freneau (1752- 
1832), a man of French extraction, possess- 
ing the talents of a ready writer, and en- 
dowed with that brightness and elasticity 
of mind which makes even shallowness of 
thought and emotion pleasing. He com- 
posed patriotic songs and ballads, satirized 
Tories, enjoyed the friendship of Franklin, 
Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, and 
was in his day quite a literary power. Most 
of his writings, whether in verse or prose, 
were "occasional," and they died with the 
occasions which called them forth. 

Perhaps a higher rank should be assigned 
to John Trumbull (1750-1831), who at the 
breaking out of the Revolution wrote the 
first canto of "McFingal,"and published the 
third in 1782. This poem, written in Hudi- 
brastic verse, is so full of original wit and 
humor that we hardly think of it as an imi- 
tation of Butler's immortal doggerel until 
we are reminded that many of the pithy 
couplets of "McFingal" are still quoted as 
felicitous hits of the ingenious mind of the 
author of " Hudibras." The immense popu- 
larity of the poem is unprecedented in Amer- 
ican literary history. The first canto rapid- 



ly ran through thirty editions. Longfellow's 
" Evangeline" attained about the same cir- 
culation when the population of the coun- 
try was thirty millions. "McFingal" was 
published when our population was only 
three millions. The poem, indeed, is to be 
considered as one of the forces of the Revo- 
lution, because, as a satire on the Tories, it 
penetrated into every farm-house, and sent 
the rustic volunteers laughing into the 
ranks of Washington and Greene. The vig- 
or of mind and feeling displayed throughout 
the poem gives an impetus to its incidents 
which " Hudibras," with all its wonderful 
flashes of wit, comparatively lacks. 

Francis Hopkinson (1737-91) was anoth- 
er of the writers who served the popular 
cause by seizing every occasion to make the 
British pretensions to rule ridiculous as well 
as hateful. His " Battle of the Kegs" prob- 
ably laughed a thousand men into the re- 
publican ranks. His son, Francis Hopkin- 
son, wrote the most popular of American 
lyrics, "Hail, Columbia." It is curious that 
this ode has no poetic merit whatever. 
There is not a line, not an epithet, in the 
whole composition which distinguishes it 
from the baldest prose. 

Robert Treat Paine, Jun., was originally 
named by his father Thomas ; but being a 
zealous Federalist, he induced the Legisla- 
ture of Massachusetts to change his cogno- 
men into Robert Treat, because, detesting 
the theological iconoclast who was both a 
Democrat and an infidel, he desired, he said, 
to have a Christian name. His song of 
" Adams and Liberty" is far above Hopkiti- 
son's "Hail, Columbia" in emphasis of phrase, 
richness of illustration, and resounding har- 
mony of versification. Even now it kindles 
enthusiasm, like the lyrics of Campbell, 
though it is, of course, more mechanical in 
structure and more rhetorical in tone than 
the " Battle of the Baltic" and the " Mari- 
ners of England." At the time, however, it 
roused a similar enthusiasm. 

But all the poets of the United States 
were threatened with extinction or subor- 
dination when Joel Barlow (1755-1812) ap- 
peared. He was, according to all accounts, 
an estimable man, cursed with the idea not 
only that he was a poet, but the greatest of 
American poets ; and in 1808 he published, 
in a superb quarto volume, " The Columbiad." 



EAELY NOVELISTS. 



357 



It was also published iu Paris and London. 
The London Monthly Magazine tried to prove 
not only that it was an epic poem, but that 
it was surpassed only by the Iliad, the ^Eneid, 
and " Paradise Lost." Joel Barlow is fairly 
entitled to the praise of raising mediocrity 
to dimensions almost colossal. Columbia is, 
thank Heaven, still alive ; "TheColumbiad" 
is, thank Heaven, hopelessly dead. There 
are some elderly gentlemen still living who 
declare that they have read " The Columbi- 
ad," and have derived much satisfaction from 
the perusal of the same ; but their evidence 
can not stand the test of cross-examination. 
They can not tell what the poem is, what it 
teaches, and what it means. No critic with- 
in the last fifty years has read more than a 
hundred lines of it, and even this effort of 
attention has been a deadly fight with those 
merciful tendencies in the human organiza- 
tion which softly wrap the overworked mind 
iu the blessedness of sleep. It is the im- 
possibility of reading "The Columbiad" 
which prevents any critical estimate of its 
numberless demerits. 

It is to be noted that, admitting all the 
poetic talent that our versifiers from 1776 to 
1810 can claim, they are exceeded in all the 
requisites of poetry by contemporary prose 
writers. Fisher Ames, in a political article 
contributed to a newspaper, often display- 
ed a richness of imagery, a harmony of dic- 
tion, and an intensity of sentiment and pas- 
sion which would have more than supplied 
our rhymers with materials for a canto. 
John Jay was not, like Fisher Ames, a man 
who thought in images, yet in one instance 
his fervid honesty enabled him to outleap 
every versifier of his time in the exercise of 
impassioned imagination. In a letter ad- 
dressed to the States of the Confederation 
he showed the horrible injustice wrought 
by the depreciated currency of the country. 
"Humanity," he said, "as well as justice, 
makes this demand upon you ; the com- 
plaints of ruined widows and the cries of fa- 
therless children, whose whole support has 
been placed in your hands and melted away, 
have doubtless reached you ; take care that 
they ascend no higher." And, if we consider 
poetry in its inmost essence, what can ex- 
ceed in sentiment and imagination the state- 
ment in prose of the perfections of the maid- 
en whom Jonathan Edwards, the austere 



theologian, was so fortunate as to win for 
his wife ? To be sure, the description runs 
back to the year 1723, when Edwards was 
only twenty years old. " They say," he 
writes, "there is a young lady in New Ha- 
ven who is beloved of that Great Being who 
made and rules the world, and that there 
are certain seasons in which this Great Be- 
ing, in some way or other invisible, comes 
to her and fills her mind with exceeding 
sweet delight, and that she hardly cares for 
any thing except to meditate on Him, that 
she expects, after a while, to be received up 
where He is, to be raised up out of the world 
and caught up into heaven, being assured 
that He loves her too well to let her remain 
at a distance from Him always. There she 
is to dwell with Him, and to be ravished 
with His love and delight forever. There- 
fore, if you present all the world before 
her, with the richest of its treasures, she dis- 
regards it and cares not for it, and is un- 
mindful of any pain or affliction. She has 
a strange sweetness in her mind, and singu- 
lar purity in her affections; is most just and 
conscientious in all her conduct ; and you 
could not persuade her to do any thing 
wrong or sinful if you would give her all 
the world, lest she should offend this Great 
Being. She is of a wonderful sweetness, 
calmness, and universal benevolence of 
mind, especially after this Great God has 
manifested Himself to her mind. She will 
sometimes go about from place to place 
singing sweetly, and seems to be always 
full of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for 
what. She loves to be alone, walkiug in the 
fields and groves, and seems to have some 
one invisible always conversing with her." 
The " sage and serious" Spenser, in all his 
lovely characterizations of feminine excel- 
lence, never succeeded in depicting a soul 
more exquisitely beautiful than this of Sa- 
rah Pierrepont as viewed through the con- 
secrating imagination of Jonathan Edwards. 
The leading writers of fiction during the 
period immediately succeeding the Revolu- 
tion were Susauna Rowson, Hugh Henry 
Brackenridge, and Charles Brockden Brown. 
Mrs. Rowson's novel of Charlotte Temple at- 
tained the unprecedented circulation of 
25,000 copies, not so much for its literary 
merits as on account of its foundation in a 
mysterious domestic scandal which affected 



358 



A CENTUKY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



the reputation of a number of prominent 
American families. Brackenridge was a 
Democrat of a peculiar kind, generally sup- 
porting his party, but reserving to himself 
the right of criticising and satirizing it. At 
the time the antislavery section of the Dem- 
ocratic party in the State of New York was 
called by the nickname of " Barnburners," 
Mr. J. G. Saxe, the poet, was asked to define 
his position. " I am," he replied, " a Demo- 
crat with a proclivity to arson." Bracken- 
ridge at an earlier period showed a similar 
restlessness in his dissent from the policy 
of a party whose principles he generally 
advocated. His principal work is Modem 
Chivalry ; or, the Adventures of Captain Far- 
rago and Teague O'Eegan, his Servant. The 
author had a vague idea of Americanizing 
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The ad- 
ventures are somewhat coarsely and clum- 
sily portrayed, but it gave Brackenridge an 
opportunity to satirize the practical work- 
ings of Democracy, and he did it with piti- 
less severity. Teague is represented as a 
creature only a little raised above the con- 
dition of a beast, ignorant, credulous, greedy, 
and brutal, lacking both common-sense and 
moral sense, but still ambitious to attain po- 
litical office, and willing to put himself for- 
ward as a candidate for posts the duties of 
which he could not by any possibility per- 
form. The exaggeration is heightened at 
times into the most farcical caricature, but 
the book can be read even now with profit 
by the champions of civil service reform. 
There are also in the course of the narra- 
tive some deadly shafts launched, in a hu- 
morous way, against the institution of slav- 
ery. Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) 
was our first novelist by profession. At the 
time he wrote Arthur Mervyn, Edgar Huntley, 
Clara Howard, and TVieland the remunera- 
tion of the novelist was so small that he 
could only make what is called "a living" 
by sacrificing every grace and felicity of 
style to the inexorable need of writing rap- 
idly, and therefore inaccurately. Brown, in 
his depth of insight into the morbid phe- 
nomena of the human mind, really antici- 
pated Hawthorne; but hurried as he was 
by that most malignant of literary devils, 
the printer's, he produced no such master- 
pieces of literary art as The Scarlet Letter, 
The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun. 



Brown is one of the most melancholy in- 
stances of a genius arrested in its orderly 
development by the pressure of circum- 
stances. In mere power his forgotten nov- 
els rank very high among the products of 
the American imagination. And it should be 
added that though he is unread, he is by no 
means unreadable. TVieland; or, the Trans- 
formation, has much of the thrilling interest 
which fastens our attention as we read God- 
win's Caleb Williams, or Hawthorne's Scarlet 
Letter. With all his faults, Brown does not 
deserve to be the victim of the bitterest 
irony of criticism, that, namely, of not beiug 
considered worth the trouble of a critical ex- 
amination. His writings are contemptuous- 
ly classed among dead books, interesting to 
the antiquary alone. Still, they have that 
vitality which comes from the presence of 
genius, and a little stirring of the ashes un- 
der which they are buried would reveal 
sparks of genuine fire. 

The progress of theology during the thir- 
ty years which followed the Revolution is 
illustrated by the works of many men of 
mark in their profession, and by two men 
of original though somewhat crotchety re- 
ligious genius, Samuel Hopkins and Na- 
thaniel Emmous. It is the rightful boast 
of Calvinism, that whatever judgment may 
be passed on the validity of its dogmas, 
nobody can question its power to give 
strength to character, to educate men into 
strict habits of deductive reasoning, and to 
comfort regenerated and elected souls with 
the blissful feeling that they are in direct 
communication with the Divine mind. But 
even before the Revolution broke out there 
was a widely diffused though somewhat 
lazy mental insurrection against its doc- 
trines by men who were formally connected 
with its churches ; aud Jonathan Edwards, 
the greatest successor of Calvin, was dis- 
missed from his pastoral charge in North- 
ampton because he had attempted to re- 
fuse Christian fellowship to those members 
of the church who, though they assented to 
Calvinistic opinions, had given "no evi- 
dence of saving grace" in their hearts. The 
devil, Edwards said, was very orthodox in 
faith, and his speculative knowledge in di- 
vinity exceeded that of " a hundred saints 
of ordinary education." It was but natural 
that the unconverted members of orthodox 



THOMAS PAINE. 



359 



churches, who were distinguished more hy 
their social positiou, wealth, aud good moral 
character thau by their capacity to stand 
Edwards's test of vital piety, should end in 
doubting the truth of the doctrines by the 
relentless application of which they were pro- 
scribed as non-Christian. The Revolution 
brought into the country not merely French 
soldiers, but the skeptical philosophy of the 
great French writers of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. The French officers were practical- 
ly missionaries of unbelief. The light but 
stinging mockery of Voltaire had educated 
the intelligent French mind into a shallow 
contempt for all the mysteries of the Chris- 
tian religion ; and in fighting for our liber- 
ties, these gay, bright Frenchmen fought 
also against our accredited theological faith. 
There is something ludicrous in this contact 
of the French with the Yankee mind. Men 
like Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams, and 
others, had already adopted opinions which 
were opposed to Calvinism, but they had no 
strong impulse to announce their religious 
convictions. The general drift of the pop- 
ular mind set in such an opposite direction, 
that they hesitated to peril their political 
aims in a vain attempt to enforce their 
somewhat languid theological views. Uni- 
tarianism, or Liberal Christianity, so called, 
had not yet arisen ; and the protest against 
Calvinism first took the form of an open de- 
nial of the Christian faith. Thus Ethan 
Allen published, in 1784, a work which he 
called Season the Only Oracle of Man. He 
summoned the fort of Ticonderoga to sur- 
render in " the name of the Great Jehovah, 
and of the Continental Congress ;" he after- 
ward demanded that the impregnable for- 
tress of Christianity should surrender in the 
name of Ethan Allen. Christianity declined 
to obey the summons of this stalwart Ver- 
mont soldier — doubtless much to his sur- 
prise. 

But the man who was the most influen- 
tial assailant of the orthodox faith was 
Thomas Paine. He was the arch-infidel, 
the infidel par eminence, whom our early and 
later theologians have united in holding up 
as a monster of iniquity and unbelief. The 
truth is that Paine was a dogmatic, well- 
meaning iconoclast, who attacked religion 
without having any religious experience or 
any imaginative perception of the vital spir- 



itual phenomena on which religious faith is 
based. Nobody can read his Age of Reason, 
after having had some preparatory knowl- 
edge derived from the study of the history 
of religions, without wondering at its shal- 
lowness. Paine is, in a spiritual applica- 
tion of the phrase, color-blind. He does 
not seem to know what religion is. The 
reputation he enjoyed was due not more to 
his masterly command of all the avenues to 
the average popular mind than to the im- 
portance to which he was lifted by his hor- 
rified theological adversaries. His merit 
as a writer against religion consisted in 
his hard, almost animal, common-sense, to 
whose tests he subjected the current theo- 
logical dogmas. He was a kind of vulgar- 
ized Voltaire. His eminent services to the 
country during the Revolutionary war were 
generally known — indeed, were acknowl- 
edged by the leading statesmen of the Unit- 
ed States. His memorable pamphlet en- 
titled Common-Sense reached a circulation 
of a hundred thousand copies. It was fol- 
lowed up by a series of tracts, under the 
general name of " The Crisis," which were 
almost as efficient as their predecessor in 
rousing, sustaining, and justifying the pa- 
triotism of the nation. He was the author 
of the now familiar maxim that " these are 
the times that try men's souls." His after- 
career in England and France resulted in 
his pamphlet on The Bights of Man, direct- 
ed against Burke's assault on the principles 
and methods of the French Revolutionists 
of 1789. It was unmistakably the ablest 
answer that any of the democrats of France, 
England, and the United States had made 
to Burke's eloquent and philosophic im- 
peachment of the motives and conduct of 
the actors in that great convulsion. One 
passage still survives, because it almost ri- 
vals Burke himself in the power of making 
a thought tell on the general mind by apt- 
ness of imagery. "Nature," says Paine, 
" has been kinder to Mr. Burke than he is 
to her. He is not affected by the realities 
of distress touching his heart, but by the 
showy resemblauce of it striking his imagi- 
nation. He pities the plumage, hut forgets the 
dying bird." A writer thus known to the 
American people not only as the champion 
of their individual rights, but of the rights 
of all mankind, could not fail to exert much 



360 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



influence "when he brought his peculiar pow- 
er of simple, forcible, and sarcastic state- 
ment to an assault on the religion of the 
country whose nationality he had done so 
much to establish. He never touched the 
inmost sanctuaries of Calvinism, though he 
seriously damaged some of its outworks ; and 
the fault of the eminent divines who op- 
posed him was in throwing all their strength 
in defending what was proved in the end 
to be indefensible. 

Indeed, it is pitiable to witness the ob- 
structions which strong minds and religious 
hearts raised against an inevitable tenden- 
cy of human thought. While infidelity was 
slowly undermining the system of theology 
on which they based the sentiment and the 
substance of religious belief, these theolo- 
gians exerted their powers of reasoning in 
controversies, waged against each other, re- 
lating to the question whether deductive 
arguments from adroitly detached Script- 
ural texts could fix the time when original 
sin made infants liable to eternal damna- 
tion. Some argued that the spiritual dis- 
ease was communicated in the moment of 
conception ; others, a little more humane, 
contended that the child must be born be- 
fore it could righteously be damned ; others 
insisted that a certain time after birth, left 
somewhat undetermined, but generally as- 
signed to the period when the child attains 
to moral consciousness, should elapse before 
it was brought under the penalties of the 
universal curse. The current theology of 
his time could not sustain the attacks of 
such a hard, vulgar reasoner as Paine, ex- 
cept by withdrawing into its vital and un- 
assailable position, namely, its power of con- 
verting depraved souls iuto loving disciples 
of the Lord. The thinking of the dominant 
theologians of that period has been quietly 
repudiated by their successors, and it has 
failed to establish any place in literature be- 
cause it was exerted on themes which the 
human mind and human heart have gradu- 
ally ignored. Still, the practical effects of 
the teaching of the great body of orthodox 
clergymen have been immense. It would 
be unjust to measure their influence by the 
success or failure of theories devised by the 
speculative ingenuity of their representa- 
tive divines. It is impossible to estimate 
too highly the services of the clergymen of 



the country in the formation of the national 
character. Their sermons have not passed 
into literature. A band of " ministers," con- 
tented with small salaries, on which they 
almost starved, and with no reputation be- 
yond their little parishes, labored year aft- 
er year in the obscure work of purifying, 
elevating, and regenerating the individuals 
committed to their pastoral charge ; and 
when they died, in all the grandeur with 
which piety invests poverty, they were swift- 
ly succeeded by men who valiantly trod the 
same narrow path, leading to no success 
recognized on earth as brilliant or self-sat- 
isfying. 

The period of our literary history between 
1810 and 1840 witnessed the rise and growth 
of a literature which was influenced by the 
new "revival of letters" in England during 
the early part of the present century, repre- 
sented by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, 
Scott, Campbell, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and 
Moore. Most of these eminent men were 
not only writers but powers; they commu- 
nicated spiritual life to the soul, as well as 
beautiful images and novel ideas to the 
mind ; and touching, as they did, the pro- 
foundest sources of imagination, reason, and 
emotion, they quickened latent individual 
genius into original activity by the mag- 
netism they exerted on sympathetic souls, 
and thus stimulated emulation rather than 
imitation. The wave of Wordsworthiauisni 
swept gently over New England, and here 
and there found a mind which was men- 
tally and morally refreshed by drinking 
deeply of this new water of life. But Pope 
was still for a long time the pontiff of po- 
etry, recognized by the cultivated men of 
Boston no less than by the cultivated men 
of London and Edinburgh. Probably there 
occurred no greater and more sudden change 
from the old school to the new than in the 
case of a precocious lad who bore the name 
of William Cullen Bryant. At the age of 
fourteen, in the year 1808, he produced a 
versified satire on Jefferson's administra- 
tion called " The Embargo." It was just as 
good and just as bad as most American imi- 
tations of Pope; but the boy indicated a fa- 
cility in using the accredited verse of the 
time which excited the wonder and admira- 
tion of his elders. Vigor, compactness, ring- 
ing emphasis in the constantly recurring 



WILLIAM C. BRYANT. 



361 



rhymes, all seemed to show that a new Pope 
had been horn in Massachusetts. The gen- 
ius of the lad, however, was destined to take 
a different road to fame than that which was 
marked out by his admirers. He read the lyr- 
ical ballads of Wordsworth ; and his friend, 
E. H. Dana, informs us that Bryant confess- 
ed to him that on reading that volume " a 
thousand spriugs seemed to gush up at once 
into his heart, and the face of nature of a 
sudden changed into a strange freshness 
and life." Accordingly his next poem of 
any importance was " Thanatopsis." We 
are told that it was written when he was 
only eighteen. It was published in the 
Noilh American Review for 1816, when he 
was twenty-two. The difference of four 
years makes little difference in the remark- 
able fact that the poem indicates no sign 
of youth whatever. The perfection of its 
rhythm, the majesty and dignity of the 
tone of matured reflection which breathes 
through it, the solemnity of its underlying 
sentiment, and the austere unity of the per- 
vading thought, would deceive almost any 
critic into affirming it to be the product of 
an imaginative thinker to whom " years had 
brought the philosophic mind." Still it must 
be remembered that the poets in whom med- 
itation and imagination have been most har- 
moniously blended have produced some of 
their best works when they were compara- 
tively young. This is specially the case as 
regards Wordsworth. His poem on revisiting 
Tiutern Abbey, written when he was twen- 
ty-eight, introduced an absolutely new ele- 
ment into English poetry, and was specially 
characterized by that quality of calm, deep, 
solid reflection which is commonly consid- 
ered to be the peculiarity of genius when it 
has attained the maturity which age and 
experience alone can give. The wonder- 
ful "Ode on the Intimations of Immortali- 
ty from Eecollections of Early Childhood," 
written about four years later, indicates the 
highest point which the poetic insight and 
the philosophic wisdom of Wordsworth ever 
reached; and it ought, on ordinary princi- 
ples of criticism, to have been written thir- 
ty years later than the date which marks 
its birth. Nothing which Wordsworth aft- 
erward wrote, though precious in itself, dis- 
played any thing equal to these poems in 
maturity of thought and imagination. It 



is doubtful if Bryant's "Thanatopsis" has 
been excelled by the many deep and beauti- 
ful poems which he has written since. In 
his case, as in that of Wordsworth, we are 
puzzled by the old head suddenly erected on 
young shoulders. They leap over the age 
of passion by a single bound, and become 
poetic philosophers at an age when other 
poets are in the sensuous stage of imagina- 
tive development. In estimating the claim 
of Bryant to be ranked as the foremost of 
American poets, it may be said that he 
opened a rich and deep, if somewhat nar- 
row, vein, which he has worked with mar- 
velous skill, and that he has obtained more 
pure gold from his mine than many others 
who have sunk shafts here and there into 
more promising deposits of the precious 
metal. He is, perhaps, unequaled among 
our American poets in his grasp of the ele- 
mental life of nature. His descriptions of 
natural scenery always imply that nature, 
in every aspect it turns to the poetic eye, 
is thoroughly alive. Nobody can read his po- 
ems called " The Evening Wind," " Green 
River," " The Death of the Flowers," the 
invocation " To a Water- Fowl," " An Even- 
ing Reverie," " To the Fringed Gentian," 
not to mention others, without feeling that 
this poet has explored the inmost secrets 
of nature, and has shown how natural ob- 
jects can be wedded to the human mind 
in " love and holy passion." In the ab- 
stract imagination Avhich celebrates the 
fundamental idea and ideal of our Ameri- 
can life, what can excel his noble verses 
on "The Antiquity of Freedom?" "The 
Land of Dreams" is perhaps the most ex- 
quisite of Bryant's poems, as in it thought, 
sentiment, and imagination are more com- 
pletely dissolved in melody than in any oth- 
er of his poems. In a criticism of the range 
of Bryant's mind it must be remembered 
that his poetry is only one expression of 
it. His life has been generally passed in 
political struggles which have called forth 
all his powers of statement and reasoning, 
based on a patient study of the phenomena 
presented by our social and political life. 
As the editor of the New York Evening Post, 
he has shown himself an able publicist, an 
intelligent economist, and a resolute party 
champion. And at a period of life when 
most men are justified in resting from their 



362 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



labors, he undertook the gigantic task of 
translating into blank verse such as few but 
he can give, the whole of the Iliad and the 
Odyssey. 

Another eminent writer of the period, and 
one who also happily survives, at the ad- 
vanced age of eighty-eight, an object of the 
deserved respect and admiration of his coun- 
trymen, was Richard Henry Dana. His ar- 
ticles in the North American Review, from 1817 
to 1819, were remarkable compositions for 
the time. The long paper on the English 
poets, published in 1819, surveys the whole 
domain of English poetry from Chaucer to 
Wordsworth. It exhibits a comprehensive- 
ness of taste, a depth and delicacy of critical 
perception, and a grasp of the spiritual ele- 
ments which enter into the highest efforts of 
creative minds, unexampled in any previous 
American contribution to the philosophy of 
criticism. His discernment of the relative 
rank and worth of British poets is special- 
ly noticeable. He interpreted before he 
judged ; and in interpreting he showed, in 
old George Chapman's phrase, that he pos- 
sessed the "fit key," that is, the "deep and 
treasurous heart," 

"With poesy to open poesy." 

Even among the cultivated readers of the 
North American, there were few who could 
appreciate Dana's profound analysis of the 
genius of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In 
1821 he began The Idle Man, of which six 
numbers were published. In this appeared 
his celebrated paper on Edmund Kean, the 
best piece of theatrical criticism in Amer- 
ican literature ; two novels, Tom Thornton 
and Paid Felton, dealing with the darker 
passions of our nature in a style so abrupt, 
a feeling so intense, and a moral purpose so 
inexorable that they rather terrified than 
pleased the " idle men" who read novels ; 
and several of those beautiful meditations 
on nature and human life, in which the au- 
thor exhibits himself as 

" A being breathing thoughtful breath, 
A traveler betwixt life and death." 

The Idle Man did not succeed. In 1827 he 
published a thin volume entitled The Buc- 
caneer, and Other Poems. These are suffi- 
cient to give him a high rank among Amer- 
ican poets, though they have obtained but 



little hold on popular sympathy. "The 
Buccaneer" is remarkable for its represen- 
tation, equally clear, of external objects 
and internal moods of thought and passion. 
In one sense it is the most "objective" of 
poems; in another, the most "subjective." 
The truth would seem to be that Dana's 
overpowering conception of the terrible re- 
ality of sin — a conception almost as strong 
as that which was fixed in the imagination 
of Jonathan Edwards — interferes with the 
artistic disposition of his imagined scenes 
and characters, and touches even some of 
his most enchanting pictures with a certain 
baleful light. An uneasy spiritual discon- 
tent, a moral despondency, is evident in his 
verse as well as in his prose, and his large 
powers of reason and imagination seem 
never to have been harmoniously blended 
in his artistic creations. Still, he remains 
one of the prominences of our literature, 
whether considered as poet, novelist, critic, 
or general thinker. 

Washington Allston,the greatest of Amer- 
ican painters, was also a graceful poet. 
" His mind," says Mr. Dana, " seems to have 
in it the glad but geutle brightness of a 
star, as you look up to it, sending pure in- 
fluences into your heart, and making it kind 
and cheerful." As a poet, however, he is 
now but little known. As a prose writer, 
his lectures on Art, and especially his ro- 
mance of Monaldi, show that he could paint 
with the pen as well as with the brush. It 
is difficult to understand why Monaldi has 
not obtained a permanent place in our lit- 
erature. There is in it one description of a 
picture representing the visible struggle of 
a soul in the toils of sin which, in intensity 
of conception and passion, exceeds any pic- 
ture he ever painted. The full richness of 
Allston's mind was probably only revealed 
to those who for years enjoyed the inesti- 
mable privilege of hearing him converse. 
It is to be regretted that no copious notes 
were taken of his conversations. Mrs. 
Jameson, in her visit to the United States, 
was so surprised to witness such opulence 
of thought conveyed in such seemingly 
careless talk, that she took a few notes of 
his deep and beautiful sayings. It would 
have been well if Dana and others who 
from day to day and year to year saw the 
clear stream of conversation flow ever on 



WASHINGTON IRVING. 



363 



from the same inexhaustible mind, had 
made the world partakers of the wealth 
with which they were enriched. Allston, 
iudeed, was one of those men whose works 
are hardly the measure of their powers — 
who can talk better than they can write, 
and conceive more vividly than they can 
execute. 

The "revival" of American literature in 
New York differed much in character from 
its revival in New England. In New York 
it was purely human in tone ; in New En- 
gland it was a little superhuman in tone. 
In New England they feared the devil ; in 
New York they dared the devil ; and the 
greatest and most original literary dare- 
devil in New York was a young gentleman 
of good family, whose "schooling" ended 
with his sixteenth year, who had rambled 
much about the island of Manhattan, who 
had in his saunterings gleaned and brooded 
over many Dutch legends of an elder time, 
who had read much but had studied little, 
who possessed fine observation, quick intel- 
ligence, a genial disposition, and an indo- 
lently original genius in detecting the lu- 
dicrous side of things, and whose name was 
Washington Irving. After some prelimina- 
ry essays in humorous literature, his genius 
arrived at the age of indiscretion, and he 
produced, at the age of twenty-six, the most 
deliciously audacious work of humor in our 
literature, namely, The History of New York, 
by Diedrich Knickerbocker. It is said of 
some reformers that they have not only 
opinions, but the courage of their opinions. 
It may be said of Irving that he not only 
caricatured, but had the courage of his car- 
icatures. The persons whom he covered 
with ridicule were the ancestors of the lead- 
ing families of New York, and these families 
prided themselves on their descent. Aft- 
er the publication of such a book he could 
hardly enter the "best society" of New York, 
to which he naturally belonged, without 
running the risk of being insulted, espe- 
cially by the elderly women of fashion ; but 
he conquered their prejudices by the same 
grace and geniality of manner, by the same 
unmistakable tokens that he was an inborn 
gentleman, through which he afterward won 
his way into the first society of England, 
France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Still, 
the promise of Knickerbocker was not ful- 



filled. That book, if considered as an imi- 
tation at all, was an imitation of Rabelais, 
or Swift, or of any author in any language 
who had shown an independence of all con- 
vention, who did not hesitate to commit in- 
decorums, and who laughed at all the regal- 
ities of the world. The author lived long 
enough to be called a timid imitator of Ad- 
dison and Goldsmith. In fact, he imitated 
nobody. His genius, at first riotous and 
unrestrained, became tamed and regulated 
by a larger intercourse with the world, by 
the saddening experience of life, and by the 
gradual development of some deep senti- 
ments which held in check the audacities 
of his wit and humor. But even in the por- 
tions of The Sketch-Book relating to England 
it will be seen that his favorite authors be- 
longed rather to the age of Elizabeth than 
to the age of Anne. In Bracebridge Hall 
there is one chapter called " The Rookery," 
which in exquisitely poetic humor is hardly 
equaled by the best productions of the au- 
thors he is said to have made his models. 
That he possessed essential humor and pa- 
thos, is proved by the warm admiration he 
excited in such masters of humor and pathos 
as Scott and Dickens; and style is but a 
secondary consideration when it expresses 
vital qualities of genius. If he subordinated 
energy to elegance, he did it, not because 
he had the ignoble ambition to be ranked 
as "a fine writer," but because he was free 
from the ambition, equally ignoble, of sim- 
ulating a passion which he did not feel. 
The period which elapsed between the pub- 
lication of Knickerbocker's history and The 
Sketch-Book was ten years. During this 
time his mind acquired the habit of tran- 
quilly contemplating the objects which filled 
his imagination, and what it lost in sponta- 
neous vigor it gained in sureness of insight 
and completeness of representation. Eip 
Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Holloiv 
have not the humorous inspiration of some 
passages in Knickerbocker, but perhaps they 
give more permanent delight, for the scenes 
and characters are so harmonized that they 
have the effect of a picture, in which all 
the parts combine to produce one charming 
whole. Besides, Irving is one of those ex- 
ceptional authors who are regarded by their 
readers as personal friends, and the felicity 
of nature by which he obtained this dis- 



364 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



tinction was expressed in that amenity, that 
amiability of tone, which some of his au- 
stere critics have called elegant feebleness. 
As a biographer and historian, his Life of 
Columbus and his Life of Washington have 
indissolubly connected his name with the 
discoverer of the American continent and 
the champion of the liberties of his country. 
In The Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada 
and The Alhambra he occupies a unique po- 
sition among those writers of fiction who 
have based fiction on a laborious investiga- 
tion into the facts of history. His reputa- 
tion is not local, but is recognized by all 
cultivated people who speak the English 
language. If C4reat Britain established an 
English intellectual colony in the United 
States, such men as Irving and Cooper may 
be said to have retorted by establishing an 
American intellectual colony in England. 

James Fenimore Cooper was substantially 
a New Yorker, though accidentally born (in 
1789) in New Jersey. He entered Yale Col- 
lege in 1802, and, three years after, left it 
without graduating, haviug obtained a mid- 
shipman's warrant in the United States 
navy. He remained in the naval service 
for six years. In 1811 he married, and in 
1821 began a somewhat memorable literary 
career by the publication of a novel of En- 
glish life, called Precaution, which failed to 
attract much attention. In the same year, 
however, he published another novel, rela- 
ting to the Revolutionary period of our his- 
tory, called The Sjry, and rose at once to the 
position of a power of the first class in our 
literature. The novels which immediately 
followed did, on the whole, increase his rep- 
utation ; and after the publication of The 
lied Rover, in 1827, his works were not only 
eagerly welcomed by his countrymen, but 
were translated into almost all the lan- 
guages of Europe. Indeed, it seemed at 
one time that Cooper's fame was co-exten- 
sive with American commerce. The novels 
were intensely American in spirit, and in- 
tensely American in scenery and characters; 
but they were also found to contain in them 
something which appealed to human nature 
e very where. Much of their popularity was 
doubtless due to Cooper's vivid presentation 
of the wildest aspects of nature in a com- 
paratively new country, and his creation of 
characters corresponding to their physical 



environment ; but the essential influence he 
exerted is to be referred to the pleasure all 
men experience in the kindling exhibition 
of man as an active being. No Hamlets, or 
Werthers, or Ren6s, or Childe Harolds were 
allowed to tenant his woods or appear on 
his quarter-decks. Will, and the trained 
sagacity and experience directing will, were 
the invigorating elements of character 
which he selected for romantic treatment. 
Whether the scene be laid in the primitive 
forest or ou the ocean, his men are always 
struggling with each other or with the 
forces of nature. This primal quality of 
robust manhood all men understand, and it 
shines triumphantly through the interpos- 
ing fogs of French, German, Italian, and 
Russian translations. A physician of the 
mind could hardly prescribe a more efficient 
tonic for weak and sentimental natures than 
a daily diet made up of the most bracing 
passages in the novels of Cooper. 

Another characteristic of Cooper, which 
makes him universally acceptable, is his 
closeness to nature. He agrees with Words- 
worth in this, that in all his descriptions 
of natural objects he indicates that he and 
nature are familiar acquaintances, and, as 
Dana says, have "talked together." He 
takes nothing at second-hand. If brought 
before a justice of the peace, he could sol- 
emnly swear to the exact truth of his rep- 
resentations without running any risk of 
being prosecuted for perjury. Cooper as 
well as Wordsworth took nature, as it were, 
at first-hand, the perceiving mind coming 
into direct contact with the thing per- 
ceived ; but Wordsworth primarily con- 
templated nature as the divinely appoint- 
ed food for the nourishment of the spirit 
that meditates, while Cooper felt its power 
as a stimulus to the spirit that acts. No 
two minds could, in many respects, be more 
different, yet both agree iu the instinctive 
sagacity which detects the hex-oic under the 
guise of the homely. The greatest creation 
of Cooper is the hunter and trapper, Leath- 
erstocking, who appears in five of his best 
novels, namely, The Pioneers, The Last of the 
Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and 
The Deerslayer, and who is unmistakably the 
life of each. The simplicity, sagacity, and 
intrepidity of this man of the woods, his 
quaint sylvan piety and humane feeling, 



JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. 



365 



the perfect harmony established between 
his will and reason, his effectiveness equal 
to all occasions, and his determination to 
dwell on those vanishing points of civiliza- 
tion which faintly mark the domain of the 
settler from that of the savage, altogether 
combine to make up a character which is 
admired equally in log-cabins and palaces. 
Wordsworth, in one of the most exquisite 
of his minor poems — " Three Years She 
grew in Sun and Shower" — has traced the 
process of nature in making "a lady of her 
own." Certainly Leatherstocking might be 
quoted as a successful attempt of the same 
austere goddess to make, out of ruder mate- 
rials, a man of " her own." 

Cooper lived to write thirty-four novels, 
the merits of which are so .unequal that at 
times we are puzzled to conceive of them as 
the products of one mind. His failures are 
not to be referred to that decline of power 
which accompanies increasing age, for The 
Deerslayer, one of his best novels, was writ- 
ten six years after his worst novel, The Mon- 
ikins. He often failed, early as well as late 
in his career, not because his faculties were 
impaired, but because they were misdirect- 
ed. One of the secrets of his fascination 
was also one of the causes of his frequent 
dullness. He equaled De Foe in the art of 
giving reality to romance by the dextrous 
accumulation and management of details. 
In his two great sea novels, The Pilot and 
The Bed Rover, the important events are 
preceded by a large number of minor inci- 
dents, each of which promises to be an 
event. The rocks which the vessel by cun- 
ning seamanship escapes are described as 
minutely as the rocks on which she is final- 
ly wrecked. It is difficult for the reader to 
conceive that he is not reading an account 
of an actual occurrence. He unconsciously 
transports himself to the deck of the ship, 
participates in all the hopes and fears of the 
crew, thanks God when the keel just grazes 
a ledge without being seriously injured, and 
finally goes down into the " hell of waters" 
in company with his imagined associates. 
In such scenes the imagination of the read- 
er is so excited that he has no notion wheth- 
er the writer's style is good or bad. He is 
made by some magic of words to see, feel, 
realize, the situation ; the verbal method by 
which the miracle is wrought he entirely 



ignores or overlooks. But then the prelim- 
inaries to these grand scenes which exhibit 
intelligent man in a life-and-death contest 
with the unintelligent forces of nature — how 
tiresome they often are ! The early chap- 
ters of The Red Rover, for example, are dull 
beyond expression. The author's fondness 
for detail trespasses on all the reserved fund 
of human patience. It is only because " ex- 
pectation sits i' the air" that we tolerate his 
tediousuess. If we desire to witness the 
conduct of the man-of-war in the tempest 
and the battle, we must first submit to fol- 
low all the cumbersome details by which 
she is slowly detached from the dock and 
laboriously piloted into the open sea. There 
is more " padding" in Cooper's novels than in 
those of any author who can make any pre- 
tensions to rival him. His representative 
sailors, Long Tom Coffin, Tom Tiller, Night- 
ingale, Bolthrope, Trysail, Bob Yarn, not to 
mention others, are admirable as characters, 
but they are allowed to inflict too much of 
their practical wisdom on the reader. In 
fact, it is a great misfortune, as it regards 
the permanent fame of Cooper, that he wrote 
one-third, at least, of his novels at all, and 
that he did not condense the other two- 
thirds into a third of their present length. 

Cooper, on his return from Europe in 
1833 or 1834, published a series of novels 
satirizing what he considered the faults and 
vices of his countrymen. The novels have 
little literary merit, but they afforded an 
excellent opportunity to exhibit the inde- 
pendence, intrepidity, and integrity of the 
author's character. It is a pity he ever 
wrote them ; still, they proved that he be- 
came a bad novelist in order to perform 
what he deemed to be the duties of a good 
citizen. Indeed, as a brave, high-spirited, 
noble-minded man, somewhat too proud and 
dogmatic, but thoroughly honest, he was 
ever on a level with the best characters in 
his best works. 

The names of Joseph Rodman Drake and 
Fitz- Greene Halleck are connected, not 
merely by personal friendship, but by part- 
nership in poetry. Both were born in the 
same year (1795), but Drake died in 1820, 
while Halleck survived to 1867. Halleck, 
in strength of constitution as well as in 
power of mind, was much superior to his 
fragile companion ; but Drake had a real en- 



366 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



thusiasm for poetry, which Halleck, though 
a poet, did not possess. Drake's " Culprit 
Fay" is an original American poem, formed 
out of materials collected from the scenery 
and traditions of the classical American 
river, the Hudson, hut it was too hastily 
written to do justice to the fancy hy which 
it was conceived. His " Ode on the Ameri- 
can Flag" derives its chief strength from the 
resounding quatrain hy which it is closed, 
and these four lines were contributed by 
Halleck. Indeed, Drake is, on the whole, 
less rememhered hy his own poems than hy 
the beautiful tribute which Halleck made 
to his memory. They were coadjutors in the 
composition of the " Croaker Papers," orig- 
inally contributed to the New York Evening 
Post; but the superiority of Halleck to his 
friend is manifest at the first glance. One 
of the puzzles which arrest the attention 
of a historian of American literature is to 
account for the strange indifference of Hal- 
leck to exercise often the faculty which on 
occasions he showed he possessed in super- 
abundance. All the subjects he attempted 
— the " Croaker Papers," " Fanny," " Burns," 
" Red Jacket," " Alnwick Castle," " Connect- 
icut," the magnificent heroic ode, " Marco 
Bozzaris" — show a complete artistic mastery 
of the resources of poetic expression, wheth- 
er his theme be gay or grave, or compound- 
ed of the two. His extravagant admiration 
of Campbell was founded on Campbell's ad- 
mirable power of compression. Halleck 
thought that Byron was a mere rhetorician 
in comparison with his favorite poet. Yet 
it is evident to a critical reader that a good 
deal of Campbell's compactness is due to a 
studied artifice of rhythm and rhyme, while 
Halleck seemingly writes in verse as if he 
were not trammeled by its laws ; and his 
rhymes naturally recur without suggesting 
to the reader that his condensation of 
thought and feeling is at all affected by 
the necessity of rhyming. Prose has rarely 
been written with more careless ease and 
more melodious compactness than Halleck 
has shown in writing verse. The wonder is 
that with this conscious command of bend- 
ing verse into the brief expression of all the 
moods of his mind, he should have written 
so little. The only explanation is to be 
found in his skepticism as to the vital real- 
ity of those profound states of conscious- 



ness which inspire poets of less imaginative 
faculty than he possessed to incessant ac- 
tivity. He was among poets what Thacke- 
ray is among novelists. Being the well-paid 
clerk and man of business of a millionaire, 
his grand talent was not stung into exertion 
by necessity. Though he lived to the age 
of seventy-two, he allowed year after year 
to pass without any exercise of his genius. 
"What's the use?" — that was the deaden- 
ing maxim which struck his poetic faculties 
with paralysis. Yet what he has written, 
though very small in amount, belongs to the 
most precious treasures of our poetical liter- 
ature. What he might have written, had he 
so chosen, would have raised him to a rank 
among our first men of letters, which he 
does not at present hold. 

James K.Paulding (1778-1860) completes 
this peculiar group of New York authors. 
He was connected with Irving in the pro- 
duction of the " Salmagundi" essays, and 
was at one time prominent as a satirist, hu- 
morist, and novelist. Most of his writings 
are now forgotten, though they evinced a 
somewhat strong though coarse vein of hu- 
mor, which was not without its effect at the 
period when its local and political allusions 
and persoualities were understood. A scene 
in one of his novels indicates the kind of 
comicality in which he excelled. The house 
of an old reprobate situated on the bank of 
a river is carried away by a freshet. In the 
agony of his fear he strives to recall some 
prayer which he learned when a child ; but 
as he rushes distractedly up and down the 
stairs of his floating mansion, he can only 
remember the first line of the baby's hymn, 
" Now I lay me down to sleep," Avhich he in- 
cessantly repeats as he runs. 

While these New York essayists, humor- 
ists, and novelists were laughing at the New 
Englander as a Puritan and satirizing him 
as a Yankee, there was a peculiar revival of 
spiritual sentiment in New England, which 
made its mark in general as well as in the- 
ological literature. In the very home of 
Puritanism there was going on a reaction 
against the fundamental doctrines of Cal- 
vinism and the inexorable faith of the Pil- 
grim Fathers. This reaction began before 
the Revolutionary war, and continued after 
it. Jonathan Mayhew, the pastor of the 
West Church, of Boston, was not only a flam- 



CHAINING AND NORTON. 



367 



ing defender of the political rights of the 
colonies, hut his sermons also teemed with 
theological heresies. He rebelled against 
King Calvin as well as against King George. 
Probably Paine's Age of Reason had after- 
ward some effect in inducing prominent Bos- 
ton clergymen, reputed orthodox, to silently 
drop from their preaching the leading dog- 
mas of the accredited creed. With such 
accomplished ministers as Freeman, Buck- 
minster, Thacher, and their followers, ser- 
monizing became more and more a form of 
moralizing, and the "scheme of salvation" 
was ignored or overlooked in the emphasis 
laid on the performance of practical duties. 
What would now be called rationalism, ei- 
ther expressed or implied, seemed to threat- 
en the old orthodox faith with destruction 
by the subtle process of sapping and under- 
mining without directly assailing it. The 
sturdy Calvinists were at first puzzled what 
to do, as the new heresiarchs did not so 
much offend by what they preached as by 
what they omitted to preach ; but they at 
last forced those who were Unitarians in 
opinion to become Unitarians in profession, 
and thus what was intended as a peaceful 
evolution of religious faith was compelled 
to assume the character of a revolutionary 
protest against the generally received dog- 
mas of the Christian churches. The two 
men prominent in this insurrection against 
ancestral orthodoxy were William Ellery 
Channing and Andrews Norton. Channiug 
was a pious humanitarian ; Norton was an 
accomplished Biblical scholar. Channing 
assailed Calvinism because, in his opinion, 
it falsified all right notions of God; Nor- 
ton, because it falsified the true interpreta- 
tion of the Word of God. Channing's soul 
was filled with the idea of the dignity of 
human nature, which, he thought, Calvin- 
ism degraded ; Norton's mind resented what 
he considered the illogical combination of 
Scripture texts to sustain an intolerable 
theological theory. Channing delighted to 
portray the felicities of a heavenly frame of 
mind ; Norton delighted to exhibit the felic- 
ities of accurate exegesis. Both were mas- 
ters of style ; but Channing used his rheto- 
ric to prove that the doctrines of Calvinism 
were abhorrent to the God-given moral na- 
ture of man; Norton employed his somewhat 
dry and bleak but singularly lucid powers of 



statement, exposition, and logic to show that 
his opponents were deficient in scholarship 
and sophistical in argumentation. Chan- 
ning's literary reputation, which overleaped 
all the boundaries of his sect, was primarily 
due to his essay on Milton ; but Norton 
could not endure the theological system on 
which " Paradise Lost" was based, and there- 
fore laughed at the poem. Norton had lit- 
tle of that imaginative sympathy with the 
mass of mankind for which Channing was 
pre-eminently distinguished. Any body 
who has mingled much with Unitarian di- 
vines must have heard their esoteric pleas- 
antry as to what these two redoubtable 
champions of the Unitarian faith would say 
when they were transferred from earth to 
heaven. Channing, as he looks upon the 
bright rows of the celestial society, raptur- 
ously declares, "This gives me a new idea 
of the dignity of human nature ;" Norton, 
with a certain patrician exclusiveness born 
of scholarly tastes, folds his hands, and qui- 
etly says to St. Peter or St. Paul, " Rather a 
miscellaneous assemblage." But on earth 
they worked together, each after his gifts, 
to draw out all the resources of sentiment, 
scholarship, and reasoning possessed by such 
able opponents as they found in Stuart, 
Woods, and Park. There can be no doubt 
that Calvinism, in its modified Hopkinsian 
form, gained increased power by the whole- 
some shaking which Unitarianism gave it; 
for this shaking kindled the zeal, sharpened 
the intellects, stimulated the mental activ- 
ity of every professor of the evangelical 
faith. Neither Channing nor Norton, in as- 
sailing the statements in which the Calvin- 
istic creed was mechanically expressed, ex- 
hibited an interior view of the creed as it 
vitally existed in the souls of Calvinists. 
Channing, however, was still the legitimate 
spiritual successor of Jonathan Edwards in 
affirming, with new emphasis, the funda- 
mental doctrine of Christianity, that God is 
in direct communication with the souls of 
His creatures. The difference is that Ed- 
wards holds the doors of communication so 
nearly closed that only the elect can pass in ; 
Channing throws them wide open, and in- 
vites every body to be illumined in thought 
and vitalized in will by the ever-fresh out- 
pourings of celestial light and warmth. But 
Channing wrote on human nature as though 



368 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



the world was tenanted by actual or possible 
Channings, who possessed bis exceptional 
delicacy of spiritual perception, and bis ex- 
ceptional exemption from tbe temptations 
of practical life. He was, as far as a con- 
stant contemplation of tbe Divine perfec- 
tious was concerned, a meditative saint, and 
bad be belonged to tbe Roman Catbolic 
Church, he probably would, on the ground 
of his spiritual gifts, have been eventually 
canonized. Still, the seductive subjectivity 
of bis holy outlook on nature and human 
life tended to make the individual conscious- 
ness of what was just and good the measure 
of Divine justice and goodness ; and in some 
mediocre minds, which his religious genius 
magnetized, this tendency brought forth 
distressing specimens of spiritual sentimen- 
tality and pious pertness. The most curious 
result, however, of Channing's teachings 
was the swift way in which his disciples 
overleaped the limitations set by their mas- 
ter. In the course of a single generation 
some of the most vigorous minds among 
the Unitarians, practicing the freedom of 
thought which he inculcated as a duty, in- 
dulged in theological audacities of which 
he never dreamed. He was the intellectual 
father of Theodore Parker, and the intel- 
lectual grandfather of Octavius B. Froth- 
ingham. Parker and Frothingham, both 
humanitarians, but students also of the ad- 
vanced school of critical theologians, soon 
made Channing's heresies tame when com- 
pared with the heresies they promulgated. 
The Free Religionists are the legitimate 
progeny of Channing. 

But, in the interim, tbe theologian and 
preacher who came nearest to Channing in 
tbe geniality and largeness of bis nature, 
and the persuasiveness with which he en- 
forced what may be called the conservative 
tenets of Unitarianism, was Orville Dewey, a 
man whose mind was fertile, whose religious 
experience was deep, and who brought from 
the Calvinism in which he had been trained 
an interior knowledge of the system which 
he early rejected. He had a profound sense 
not only of the dignity of human nature, but 
of tbe dignity of human life. In idealizing 
human life he must still be considered as 
giving some fresh and new interpretations 
of it, and bis discourses form, like Chan- 
ning's, an addition to American literature, 



as well as a contribution to the theology of 
Unitarianism. He defended men from the 
assaults of Calvinists, as Channing had de- 
fended Man. Carlyle speaks somewhere of 
" this dog-hole of a world ;" Dewey consid- 
ered it, with all its errors and horrors, as a 
good world on the whole, and as worthy of 
the Divine beneficence. 

The work which may be said to have 
bridged over the space which separated 
Channing from Theodore Parker was Aca- 
demical Lectures on the Jewish Scriptures and 
Antiquities, by Dr. John G. Palfrey, Professor 
of Biblical Literature in the University of 
Cambridge, published in 1838, but which 
had doubtless influenced the students who 
bad listened to them many years before 
their publication. This book is noticeable 
for the scholarly method by which most of 
the miracles recorded in the Old Testament 
are explained on natural principles, and the 
calm, almost prim and polite, exclusion of 
miracle from tbe Hebrew Scriptures. Ac- 
cepting miracle when he considered it nec- 
essary, Dr. Palfrey broke tbe spell and charm, 
at least among Unitarian students of theol- 
ogy, which separated the Hebrew Bible from 
other great works which expressed the re- 
ligious mind of the human race ; and his 
Academical Lectures remain as a palpable 
landmark in the progress of American ra- 
tionalism. 

But probably the greatest literary result 
of the Unitarian revolt was the appearance 
in our literature of such a phenomenon as 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. He came from a 
race of clergymen ; doubtless much of his 
elevation of character and austere sense of 
the grandeur of the moral sentiment is his 
by inheritance ; but after entering the min- 
istry he soon found that even Unitarianism 
was a limitation of his intellectual inde- 
pendence to which he could not submit ; 
and, in the homely New England phrase, 
" he set up on his account," responsible for 
nobody, and not responsible to any body. 
His radicalism penetrated to the very root 
of dissent, for it was founded on the idea 
that in all organizations, social, political, 
and religious, there must be an element 
which checks the free exercise of individual 
thought ; and the free exercise of his indi- 
vidual thinking he determined should be 
controlled by nothing instituted and au- 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



369 



thoritative on the planet. Descartes him- 
self did not begin his philosophizing with 
a more complete self-emancipation from all 
the opinions generally accepted by man- 
kind. But Descartes was a reasoner ; Em- 
erson is a seer and a poet ; and he was the 
last man to attempt to overthrow accredit- 
ed systems in order to substitute for them 
a dogmatic system of his own. In his view 
of the duty of "man thinking," this course 
would have been to violate his fundamental 
principle, which was that nobody "could 
lay copyright on the world ;" that no theo- 
ry could include nature ; that the greatest 
thinker and discoverer could only add a 
few items of information to what the hu- 
man mind had previously won from " the 
vast and formless infinite ;" and that the 
true work of a scholar was not to inclose 
the field of matter and mind by a system 
which encircled it, but to extend our knowl- 
edge in straight lines, leading from the van- 
ishing points of positive knowledge into the 
illimitable unknown spaces beyond. Emer- 
son's peculiar sphere was psychology. By 
a certain felicity of his nature he was a 
non-combatant ; indifferent to logic, he sup- 
pressed all the processes of his thinking, 
and announced its results in affirmations ; 
and none of the asperities which commonly 
afflict the apostles of dissent ever ruffled 
the serene spirit of this universal dissenter. 
He could never be seduced into controversy. 
He was assailed both as an atheist and as a 
pantheist ; as a writer so obscure that no- 
body could understand what he meant, and 
also as a mere verbal trickster, whose only 
talent consisted in vivifying commonplaces, 
or in converting, by inversion, stale truisms 
into brilliant paradoxes ; and all these va- 
rying charges had only the effect of lighting 
up his face with that queer, quizzical, in- 
scrutable smile, that amused surprise at the 
misconceptions of the people who attacked 
him, which is noticeable in all portraits and 
photographs of his somewhat enigmatical 
countenance. His method was very simple 
and very hard. It consisted in growing up 
to a level with the spiritual objects he per- 
ceived, and his elevation of thought was 
thus the sign and accompaniment of a cor- 
responding elevation of character. In his 
case, as in the case of Channing, there was 
an unconscious return to Jonathan Ed- 
24 



wards, and to all the great divines whose 
"souls had sight" of eternal verities. What 
the orthodox saints called the Holy Ghost, 
he, without endowing it with personality, 
called the Over Soul. He believed with 
them that in God we live and move and 
have our being ; that only by communica- 
ting with this Being can Ave have any vital 
individuality ; and that the record of a com- 
munication with Him or It was the most 
valuable of all contributions to literature, 
whether theological or human. The no- 
blest passages in his writings are those in 
which he celebrates this august and gra- 
cious communion of the Spirit of God with 
the soul of man ; and they are the most se- 
rious, solemn, and uplifting passages which 
can perhaps be found in our literature. 
Here was a man who had earned the right 
to utter these noble truths by patient medi- 
tation and clear insight. Carlyle exclaim- 
ed, in a preface to an English edition of one 
of Emerson's later volumes : " Here comes 
our brave Emerson, with news from the em- 
pyrean !" That phrase exactly hits Emer- 
son as a transcendental thinker. His in-r 
sights were, in some sense, revelations ; he 
could " gossip on the eternal politics ;" and 
just at the time when science, relieved from 
the pressure of theology, announced mate- 
rialistic hypotheses with more than the con- 
fidence with which the bigots of theological 
creeds had heretofore announced their dog- 
mas, this serene American thinker had won 
his way into all the centres of European 
intelligence, and delivered his quiet protest 
against every hypothesis which put in peril 
the spiritual interests of humanity. It is 
curious to witness the process by which 
this heresiarch has ended in giving his evi- 
dence, or rather his experience, that God is 
not the Unknowable of Herbert Spencer, 
but that, however infinitely distant He may 
be from the human understanding, He is 
still intimately near to the human soul. 
And Emerson knows by experience what 
the word soul really means ! 

" Were she a body, how could she remain 
Within the body, which is less than she? 
Or how could she the world's great shape contain, 
And in our narrow breasts contained be ? 

"All bodies are confined within some place, 
But she all place within herself confines; 
All bodies have their measure and their space, 
But who can draw the soul's dimensive lines t" 



370 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



In an unpublished speech at a celebra- 
tion of Shakspeare's birthday, he spoke of 
Shakspeare as proving to us that " the soul 
of man is deeper, wider, higher than the 
spaces of astronomy ;" and in another con- 
nection he says that " a man of thought 
must feel that thought is the parent of the 
universe," that " the world is saturated with 
deity and with law." 

It is this depth of spiritual experience 
and subtilty of spiritual insight which dis- 
tinguish Emerson from all other Ameri- 
can authors, and make hini an elementary 
power as well as an elementary thinker. 
The singular attractiveness, however, of his 
writings comes from his iutense perception 
of Beauty, both in its abstract quality as 
the "awful loveliness" which such poets 
as Shelley celebrated, and in the more con- 
crete expression by which it fascinates or- 
dinary minds. His imaginative faculty, 
both in the conception and creation of 
beauty, is uncorrupted by any morbid sen- 
timent. His vision reaches to the very 
sources of beauty — the beauty that cheers. 
The great majority even of eminent poets 
are " saddest when they sing." They con- 
trast life with the beautiful possibilities of 
life which their imaginations suggest, and 
though their discontent with the actual 
may inspire by the energy of its utterance, 
it tends also to depress by emphasizing the 
impossibility of realizing the ideals it de- 
picts. But the perception of beauty in na- 
ture or in human nature, whether it be the 
beauty of a flower or of a soul, makes Em- 
erson joyous and glad; he exults in cele- 
brating it, and he communicates to his 
readers his own ecstatic mood. He has 
been a diligent student of many literatures 
and many religions ; but all his quotations 
from them show that he rejects every thing 
in his manifold readings which does not 
tend to cheer, invigorate, and elevate, which 
is not nutritious food for the healthy human 
soul. If he is morbid in any thing, it is in 
his comical hatred of all forms of physical, 
mental, and moral disease. He agrees with 
Dr. Johnson in declaring that " every man 
is a rascal as soon as he is sick." "I once 
asked," he says, " a clergyman in a retired 
town who were his companions — what men 
of ability he saw. He replied that he spent 
his time with the sick and the dying. I 



said he seemed to me to need quite other 
company, and all the more that he had this ; 
for if people were sick and dying to any pur- 
pose, we should leave all and go to them, 
but, as far as I had observed, they were as 
frivolous as the rest, and sometimes much 
more frivolous." Indeed, Emerson, glorying 
in his own grand physical and moral health, 
and fundamentally brave, is impatient of 
all the weaknesses of humanity, especially 
those of men of genius. He never could be 
made to recognize the genius of Shelley, ex- 
cept in a few poems, because he was dis- 
gusted with the wail that persistently runs 
through Shelley's wonderfully imaginative 
poetry. In his taste, as in his own practice 
as a writer, he is a stout believer in the de- 
sirableness and efficacy of mental tonics, 
and a severe critic of the literature of dis- 
content and desperation. He looks curious- 
ly on while a poet rages against destiny 
and his own miseries, and puts the ironical 
query, " Why so hot, my little man ?" His 
ideal of manhood was originally derived 
from the consciousness of his own some- 
what haughty individuality, and it has been 
fed by his study of the poetic and histor- 
ic records of persons who have dared to 
do heroic acts and dared to utter heroic 
thoughts. Beauty is never absent from his 
celebration of these, but it is a beauty that 
never enfeebles, but always braces and 
cheers. 

Take the six or eight volumes in which 
Emerson's genius and character are embod- 
ied — that is, in which he has converted truth 
into life, and life into more truth — and you 
are dazzled on every page by his superabun- 
dance of compactly expressed reflection and 
his marvelous command of all the resources 
of imaginative illustration. Every para- 
graph is literally " rammed with life." A 
fortnight's meditation is sometimes con- 
densed in a sentence of a couple of lines. 
Almost every word bears the mark of delib- 
erate thought in its selection. The most 
evanescent and elusive spiritual phenome- 
na, which occasionally flit before the steady 
gaze of the inner eye of the mind, are fixed 
in expressions which have the solidity of 
marble. The collection of these separate 
insights into nature and human life he iron- 
ically calls an essay ; and much criticism 
has been wasted in showing that the apho- 



THEODORE PARKER. 



371 



ristic and axiomatic sentences are often con- 
nected by mere juxtaposition on the page, 
and not by logical relation with each other, 
and that at the end we have no perception 
of a series of thoughts leading up to a clear 
idea of the general theme. This criticism 
is just ; but in reading Emerson we have 
not to do with such economists of thought 
as Addisou, Johnson, and Goldsmith — with 
the writers of the Spectator, the Rambler, and 
the Citizen of the World. Emerson's so-called 
essay sparkles with sentences which might 
be made the texts for numerous ordinary 
essays ; and his general title, it may be add- 
ed, is apt to be misleading. He is fragment- 
ary in composition because he is a fanatic 
for compactness ; and every paragraph, some- 
times every sentence, is a record of an in- 
sight. Heuce comes the impression that his 
sentences are huddled together rather than 
artistically disposed. Still, with all this 
lack of logical order, he has the immense 
advantage of suggesting something new to 
the diligent reader after he has read him 
for the fiftieth time. 

It is also to be said of Emerson that he is 
one of the wittiest and most practical as 
well as one of the profoundest of American 
writers, that his wit, exercised on the ordi- 
nary aifairs of life, is the very embodiment 
of brilliant good sense, that he sometimes 
rivals Franklin in humorous insight, and 
that both his wit and humor obey that law 
of beauty which governs every other exer- 
cise of his peculiar mind. He has many de- 
fects and eccentricities exasperating to the 
critic who demands symmetry in the men- 
tal constitution of the author whose pecul- 
iar merits he is eager to acknowledge. He 
occasionally indulges, too, in some strange 
freaks of intellectual and moral caprice 
which his own mature judgment should con- 
demn — -the same pen by which they were 
recorded being used to blot them out of 
existence. They are audacities, but how 
unlike his grand audacities ! In short, they 
are somewhat small audacities, unworthy 
of him and of the subjects with which he 
deals — escapades of epigram on topics which 
should have exacted the austerest exercise 
of his exceptional faculty of spiritual in- 
sight. Nothing, however, which can be said 
against him touches his essential quality 
of manliness, or lowers him from that rank 



of thinkers in whom the seer and the poet 
combine to give the deepest results of med- 
itation in the most exquisite forms of vital 
beauty. And then how superb and anima- 
ting is his lofty intellectual courage ! " The 
soul," he says, " is in her native realm, and 
it is wider than space, older than time, 
wide as hope, rich as love. Pusillanimity 
and fear she refuses with a beautiful scorn. 
They are not for her who putteth on her 
coronation robes, and goes through univers- 
al love to universal power." 

Emerson, though in some respects con- 
nected with the Unitarian movement as 
having been a minister of the denomina- 
tion, soon cut himself free from it, and was 
as independent of that form of Christian 
faith as he was of other forms. He drew 
from all quarters, and whatever fed his re- 
ligious sense of mystery, of might, of beauty, 
and of Deity was ever welcome to his soul. 
As he was outside of all religious organiza- 
tions, and never condescended to enter into 
any argument with his opponents, he was 
soon allowed silently to drop out of theo- 
logical controversy. But a fiercer and more 
combative spirit now appeared to trouble 
the Unitarian clergymen — a man who con- 
sidered himself a Unitarian minister, who 
had for Calvinism a stronger repulsion than 
Channing or Norton ever felt, and who at- 
tempted to drag on his denomination to con- 
clusions at which most of its members stood 
aghast. 

This man was Theodore Parker, a born 
controversialist, who had the challenging 
chip always on his shoulder, which he in- 
vited both his Unitarian and his orthodox 
brethren to knock off. There never was a 
man who more gloried in a fight. If any 
theologians desired to get into a controversy 
with him as to the validity of their opposing 
beliefs, he was eager to give them as much 
of it as they desired. The persecution he 
most keenly felt was the persecution of in- 
attention and silence. He was the Luther 
of radical Unitarianism. When the Unita- 
rian societies refused fellowship with his 
society, he organized a church of his own, 
and made it one of the most powerful in 
New England. There was nothing but dis- 
ease which could check and nothing but 
death which could close his controversial 
activity. He became the champion of rad- 



372 



A CENTUKY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



ical as against conservative Unitarianism, 
and the persistent adversary even of the 
most moderate Calvinism. Besides his work 
in these fields of intellectual effort, he threw 
himself literally head - foremost — and his 
head was large and well stored — into every 
unpopular reform which he could aid by his 
will, his reason, his learning, and his mor- 
al power. He was among the leaders in 
the attempt to apply the rigid maxims of 
Christianity to practical life ; and many 
orthodox clergymen, who combined with 
him in his assaults on intemperance, slav- 
ery, and other hideous evils of our civiliza- 
tion, almost condoned his theological here- 
sies in their admiration of his fearlessness 
in practical reforms. He was an enormous 
reader and diligent student, as well as a 
resolute man of affairs. He also had great 
depth and fervency of piety. His favorite 
hymn was "Nearer, my God, to Thee." 
While assailing what the great body of 
New England people believed to be the 
foundations of religion, he startled vigorous 
orthodox reasoners by his confident teach- 
ing that every individual soul had a con- 
sciousness of its immortality independent 
of revelation, and superior to the results 
of all the modern physical researches which 
seemed to place it in doubt. Indeed, his 
own incessant activity was an argument for 
the soul's immortality. In spite of all the 
outside calls on his energies, he found time 
to attend strictly to his ministerial duties, 
to make himself one of the most accom- 
plished theological and general scholars in 
New England, and to write and translate 
books which required deep study and pa- 
tient thought. The physical frame, stout 
as it was, at last broke down — his mind still 
busy in meditating new works which were 
never to be written. Probably no other 
clergyman of his time, not even Mr. Beech- 
er, drew his society so closely to himself, 
and became the object of so much warm 
personal attachment and passionate devo- 
tion. Grim as he appeared when, arrayed 
iu his theological armor, he went forth to 
battle, he was, in private intercourse, the 
gentlest, most genial, and most affectionate 
of men. And it is to be added that few or- 
thodox clergymen had a more intense re- 
ligious faith in the saving power of their 
doctrines than Theodore Parker had in the 



regenerating efficacy of his rationalistic con- 
victions. When Luther was dying, Dr. Jo- 
nas said to him, " Reverend father, do you 
die in implicit reliance on the faith you have 
taught ?" And from those lips, just closing 
in death, came the steady answering "Yes." 
Theodore Parker's answer to such a ques- 
tion, put to him on his death-bed, would 
have been the same. 

The theological protest against Unitari- 
anism was made by some of the most pow- 
erful minds and learned scholars in the 
country — by Stuart, Park, Edwards, Barnes, 
Robinson, Lyman Beecher, the whole family 
of the Alexanders, of which Addison Alex- 
ander was the greatest, not to mention fifty 
others. The thought of these men still con- 
trols the theological opinion of the country, 
and their works are much more extensively 
circulated, and exert a greater practical in- 
fluence, than the writings of such men as 
Channing, Norton, Dewey, Emerson, and 
Parker; but still they have not affected in 
a like degree the literature which springs 
from the heart, the imagination, and the 
spiritual sentiment. Unitariauism, through 
its lofty views of the dignity of human na- 
ture, naturally allied itself with the senti- 
ment of philanthropy. While it has not 
been more practically conspicuous than oth- 
er denominations for the love of man, as 
expressed in works to ameliorate his con- 
dition, it has succeeded better in domesti- 
cating philanthropy in literature, especial- 
ly in poetry. Witness Bryant, Longfellow, 
Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and Mrs. Howe. 

Longfellow is probably the most popular 
poet of the country. The breadth of his 
sympathy, the variety of his acquisitions, 
the plasticity of his imagination, the sono- 
rousness and weight of his verse, the vivid- 
ness of his imagery, the equality, the beau- 
ty, the beneficence of his disposition, make 
him universally attractive and universally 
intelligible. Each of his minor poems is 
pervaded by one thought, and has that ar- 
tistic unity which comes from the economic 
use of rich material. There is a solidity in 
them in which many occasional poems are 
wanting, though they may exhibit more fer- 
tility of thought and imagery ; this fertility 
is less directed to produce one impressive 
effect. Take the "Hymn to the Night," 
"A Psalm of Life," "Footsteps of Angels," 



LONGFELLOW AND WHITTIEE. 



373 



"The Skeleton in Armor," "The Wreck of 
the Hesperus," "The Village Blacksmith," 
"Excelsior," "The Arsenal at Springfield," 
"Sea- Weed," "Resignation," and other of 
his minor poeins have found a lodgment in 
the memory of every body, and it will be 
found that their charm consists in their uni- 
ty as well as in their beauty, that they are 
as much poems, complete in themselves, as 
" Evangeline" or " Hiawatha." Iu " Maid- 
enhood" and " Endymion," especially in the 
latter, the poet is revealed in all the exqui- 
siteness, the delicacy, the refinement, of his 
imaginative faculty ; but they are less pop- 
ular than the poeins previously mentioned, 
because they embody more subtile moods 
of the poetic mind. Longfellow's power of 
picturing to the eye and the soul a scene, a 
place, an event, a person, is almost unrivaled. 
His command of many metres, each adapted 
to his special subject, shows also how artist- 
ically he uses souud to re-enforce vision, 
and satisfy the ear while pleasing the eye. 

"When descends on the Atlantic 

The gigantic 
Storm-wind of the equinox, 
Landward in his wrath he scourges 

The toiling surges, 
Laden with sea- weed from the rocks." 

The ear least skilled to detect the harmo- 
nies of verse feels the obvious effect of lines 
like these. In his long poems, such as 
" Evangeline," " The Golden Legend," " Hi- 
awatha," "The Courtship of Miles Stan- 
dish," " The New England Tragedies," Loug- 
fellow never repeats himself. He occupies 
a new domain of poetry with each succes- 
sive poem, and always gives the public the 
delightful shock of a new surprise. In his 
prose works, Outre-Mer, Hyperion, and Eava- 
nagh, he is the same man as in his verse — 
ever sweet, tender, thoughtful, weighty, vig- 
orous, imaginative, and humane. His great 
translation of Dante is not the least of his 
claims to the gratitude of his countrymen, 
for it is a new illustration of his life-long 
devotion — rare in an American — to the serv- 
ice of literature, considered as one of the 
highest exercises of patriotism. 

Longfellow has enjoyed every advantage 
that culture can give, and his knowledge 
of many nations and many languages un- 
doubtedly has given breadth to his mind, 
and opened to him ever new sources of po- 



etic interest ; but John Greenleaf Whittier, 
who contests with him the palm of popu- 
larity as a poet, was one of those God-made 
men who are in a sense self-made poets. A 
musing farmer's boy, working in the fields, 
and ignorant of books, he early felt the po- 
etic instinct moving in his soul, but thought 
his surroundings were essentially prosaic, 
and could never be sung. At last one after- 
noon, while he was gathering in the hay, 
a peddler dropped a copy of Burns into his 
hands. Instantly his eyes were unsealed. 
There in the neighboring field was "High- 
land Mary;" "The Cotter's Saturday Night" 
occurred in his own father's pious New En- 
gland home ; and the birds which caroled 
over his head, the flowers which grew under 
his feet, were as poetic as those to which 
the Scottish plowman had given perennial 
interest. Burns taught him to detect the 
beautiful iu the common, but Burns could 
not corrupt the singularly pure soul of the 
lad by his enticing suggestions of idealized 
physical enjoyment and unregulated pas- 
sion. The boy grew into a man, cultivating 
assiduously his gift of song, though shy of 
showing it. The antislavery storm swept 
over the land, awakening consciences as 
well as stimulating intellects. Whittier 
had always lived in a region of moral ideas, 
and this antislavery inspiration inflamed 
his moral ideas into moral passion and mor- 
al wrath. If Garrison may be considered 
the prophet of antislavery, and Phillips its 
orator, and Mrs. Stowe its novelist, and Sum- 
ner its statesman, there can be no doubt 
that Whittier was its poet. Quaker as he 
was, his martial lyrics had something of the 
energy of a primitive bard urging on hosts 
to battle. Every word was a blow, as ut- 
tered by this newly enrolled soldier of the 
Lord. "The silent, shy, peace-loving man" 
became a " fiery partisan," and held his in- 
trepid way 

"against the public frown, 
The ban of church and state, the fierce mob's hound- 
ing down." 

It is impossible even now to read his kin- 
dling lyrics of that shameful period iu our 
history without feeling the blood boil in 
the veins, and experiencing the hot impulse 
to instant battle. They had a vast effect 
in rousing, condensiug, and elevating the 
public sentiment against slavery. The po- 



374 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



etry was as genuine as the wrath was ter- 
rific, and many a political time-server, who 
was proof against Garrison's hottest de- 
nunciations and Phillips's most stinging 
invectives, quailed hefore Whittier's smit- 
ing rhymes. Yet he tells us he was essen- 
tially a poetic dreamer, unfit " to ride the 
winged hippogriff Reform." 

"For while he wrought with strenuous will 
The work his hands had found to do, 
He heard the fitful music still 
Of winds that out of dream-land blew. 

"The common air was thick with dreams — 
He told them to the toiling crowd; 
Such music as the woods and streams 
Sang in his ear he sang aloud. 

"In still, shut bays, on. windy capes, 
He heard the call of beckoning shapes, 
And, as the gray old shadows prompted him, 
To homely moulds of rhyme he shaped their le- 
gends grim." 

In these lines he refers to two kinds of po- 
etry in which he has obtained almost equal 
emiueiice — his intensely imaginative and 
meditative poems, and his ringing, legend- 
ary ballads, the material of the latter hav- 
ing been gathered, in his wanderings, from 
tbe lips of sailors, farmers, and that class 
of aged women who connect each event 
they relate with the superstitions originally 
ingrafted upon it. It is needless to add 
that during the war of the rebellion, and 
the political contests accompanying recon- 
struction, the voice of Whittier rang through 
the land to cheer, to animate, to uplift, and 
also to warn and deuounce. All sorts of 
cowardice, physical, mental, political, mor- 
al, felt mean and abashed when detected 
and smitten by one of his heroic lyrics. In 
all his poetry, whether descriptive, medi- 
tative, narrative, or impassioned, the power, 
in the last analysis, is found to reside in the 
soul of the poet rather than in his excep- 
tional gifts of sensibility, understanding, and 
imaginative vision and faculty. This soul 
touched what remaius of soul existed in the 
most selfish and malignant natures ; for it 
was a soul that drew its force from the Soul 
of souls, and ever reverently listened to the 
slightest whisper of command, of monition, 
of consolation, of cheer, coming to it from 
the Divine Being it recognized as Master, 
Inspirer, and Friend. Whittier, indeed, 
though creedless, is one of the most relig- 
ious of our poets. In these days of skepti- 



cism as to the possibility of the communi- 
cation of the Divine Mind with the human, 
it is consolatory to read his poem on "The 
Eternal Goodness" — especially this stanza : 

"I know not where His islands lift 
Their fronded palms in air: 
I only know I can not drift 
Beyond His love and care." 

It is curious that Whittier, whose general 
style is so clear that every body can under- 
stand it, should, in this beautiful declara- 
tion of his abiding faith — a faith full of the 
" magnanimous might of meekness" — have 
used a technical epithet, drawn from the 
science of botany, liko " fronded." 

Oliver Wendell Holmes — wit, satirist, hu- 
morist, novelist, scholar, scientist — is, above 
every thing, a poet, for the qualities of the 
poet pervade all the operations of his vari- 
ously gifted mind. His sense of the ludi- 
crous is not keener than his sense of the 
beautiful; his wit and humor are but the 
sportive exercise of a fancy and imagina- 
tion which he has abundantly exercised on 
serious topics; and the extensive learning 
and acute logic of the man of science are 
none the less solid in substance because in 
exjiression they are accompanied by a throng 
of images and illustrations which endow 
erudition with life, and give a charm to the 
most closely linked chain of reasoning. The 
first thing which strikes a reader of Holmes 
is the vigor and elasticity of his nature. 
He is incapable of weakness. He is fresh 
and manly even when he securely treads the 
scarcely marked line which separates senti- 
ment from sentimentality. This prevailing 
vigor proceeds from a strength of individ- 
uality which is often pushed to dogmatic 
self-assertion. It is felt as much in his 
airy, fleering mockeries of folly and preten- 
sion, as in his almost Juvenalian invectives 
against baseness aud fraud — in the pleasant 
way in which he stretches a coxcomb on 
the rack of wit, as in the energy with which 
he grapples an opponent in the tussle of ar- 
gumentation. He never seems to imagine 
that he can be inferior to the thinker whose 
position he assails, any more than to the 
noodle whose nonsense he jeers at. In ar- 
gument he is sometimes the victor, in vir- 
tue of scornfully excluding what another 
reasoner would include, and thus seems to 
make his own intellect the measure of the 



HOLMES AND LOWELL. 



375 



■whole subject in discussion. When in his 
Autocrat, or his Professor, or his Poet, at 
the Breakfast Table, he touches theological 
themes, he is peculiarly exasperating to the- 
ological opponents, not only for the effect- 
iveness of his direct hits, but for the easy 
way in which he gayly overlooks considera- 
tions which their whole culture has induced 
them to deem of vital moment. The truth 
is that Holmes's dogmatism comes rather 
from the vividness and rapidity of his per- 
ceptions than from the arrogance of his per- 
sonality. " This," he seems to say, " is not 
my opinion ; it is a demonstrated law which 
you willfully ignore while pretending to be 
scholars." The indomitable courage of the 
man carries him through all the exciting 
controversies he scornfully invites ; and it 
has been found that to attack him by ar- 
gument pointed with wit is as futile as at- 
tacking a porcupine armed on all sides 
with his quills. Holmes, for the last forty 
years, has been expressing this inexhausti- 
ble vitality of nature in various ways, and 
to-day he appears as vigorous as he was in 
his prime, and more vigorous than he was 
in his youth. Indeed, he has rather grown 
younger in sentiment as he has grown older 
in years. His early poenis sparkled with 
thought and abounded in energy ; but still 
they can not be compared in wit, in humor, 
in depth of sentiment, in beauty of diction, 
in thoughtfulness, in lyrical force, with the 
poems of the past twenty-five years of his 
life. It is needless to give even the titles 
of the many pieces which are fixed in the 
memory of all cultivated readers among 
his countrymen. His novels, Elsie Venner 
and The Guardian Angel, rank high among 
original American contributions to the do- 
main of romance. In prose, as in verse, his 
fecundity and vigor of thought have found 
adequate expression in a corresponding 
point and compactness of style. 

James Eussell Lowell is now in the prime 
of his genius and at the height of his repu- 
tation. His earlier poems, pervaded by the 
transcendental tone of thought current in 
New England at the time they were written, 
were full of promise, but gave little evidence 
of the wide variety of power he has since 
displayed. The spirituality of his thinking 
has deepened with advancing years. Noth- 
ing in his first volume, A Tear's Life, sug- 



gests the depth of moral beauty he afterward 
embodied in "The Vision of Sir Launfal," 
the throng of subtle thoughts and images 
which almost confuse us by their multiplic- 
ity in "The Cathedral," and the grandeur 
of " The Commemoration Ode." Still less 
could it have been supposed that the youth- 
ful poetical enthusiast, singing of sirens and 
such questionable folks, should have sup- 
pressed that side of his richly endowed na- 
ture, by which he has since obtained a prom- 
inent rank among the greatest wits, satirists, 
and humorists of the century. The Biglow 
Papers are unique in our literature. Low- 
ell adds to his other merits that of being an 
accomplished philologist ; but granting his 
scholarship as an investigator of the pop- 
ular idioms of foreign speech, he must be 
principally esteemed for his knowledge of 
the Yankee dialect. Hosea Biglow is al- 
most the only writer who uses the dialect 
properly, and most other pretenders to a 
knowledge of it must be considered carica- 
turists as compared with him; for Biglow, 
like Burns, makes the dialect he employs 
flexible to every mood of thought and pas- 
sion, from good sense as solid as granite to 
the most bewitching descriptions of nature 
and the loftiest affirmations of conscience. 
Lowell has been doubly doctored by the En- 
glish universities of Oxford and Cambridge, 
but it is understood that this exceptional 
distinction was not so much due to the range 
of his scholarship and the beauty and power 
of his English prose and verse as to the new 
vein of sense, sentiment, and imagination 
he opened in The Bigloiv Papers — some of 
which, by-the-way, are the sharpest satires 
on England ever written, especially in com- 
menting on her conduct to this country dur- 
ing the storm and stress of the Southern re- 
bellion. As a prose writer, Lowell is quite 
as eminent as he is as a poet. His essays, 
where nature is his theme, are brimful of de- 
licious descriptions, and his critical papers 
on Chaucer, Shakspeare, Spenser, Drydeu, 
Pope, and Kousseau, not to mention others, 
are masterpieces of their kind. His defect, 
both as poet and prose writer, comes from 
the too lavish use of his seemingly inex- 
haustible powers of wit, fancy, and imagina- 
tion. He is apt to sacrifice unity of general 
effect by overloading his paragraphs with 
suggestive meaning. The mind is some- 



376 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



times dazzled away from the general sub- 
ject by the wit and beauty of the separate 
illustrations and images which are intended 
to enforce it. Aline or a sentence contains 
something so charming in itself that we 
forget the end in the means. That wise 
reserve of expression to which Longfellow 
owes so much of his reputation, that subor- 
dination of miuor thoughts to the leading 
thought of the poem or essay, are frequent- 
ly disregarded by Lowell. His mind is too 
rich to submit even to artistic checks on its 
fertility. 

Julia Ward Howe, one of the most ac- 
complished women in the United States, a 
scholar, a reasoner, an excellent prose writer, 
a poet with the power to uplift as well as 
to please, is also generally known as a 
champion of the right of women to vote. 
In the facts, arguments, and appeals which 
she brings to bear on this debated question, 
and the felicity of the occasional sarcastic 
strokes with which she smites an opponent 
who has offended her reason as well as 
vexed her patience, we find a woman fully 
equipped to do battle for the cause of wom- 
an; and certainly that man must be excep- 
tionally endowed with brains who can af- 
ford to indulge in the luxury of despising 
her intellect. Loftiness of sentiment and 
force of mind are her prevailing character- 
istics ; but she also possesses a certain de- 
mure humor which is all the more effective 
from its seeming innocence of humorous in- 
tent. It was she who said, when she saw a 
sign on which in large letters was printed, 
"Boston Charitable Eye and Ear Infirm- 
ary," that she did not know till then that 
there were any charitable eyes and ears in 
Boston. As a poet she is comparatively lit- 
tle appreciated as regards the depth and 
subtilty of thought and imagination which 
are discernible to the critical eye in her vol- 
ume of Later Lyrics. That volume, to be 
sure, includes the poems which have made 
her reputation ; but they are known to the 
public through newspapers rather than 
from the possession of the volume, of which 
they form but a small portion. The thrill- 
ing "Battle Hymn of the Republic" is an 
artistic variation on the John Brown soug. 
The original is incomparable of its kind. 
No poet could have written it. Such rude- 
ness aud wildness are beyond the concep- 



tion even of Walt Whitman and the author 
of "Festus." One would say that it was 
written by the common soldiers who sang 
it as they advanced to battle ; that it was 
an elemental tune, suited to the rugged na- 
tures that shouted its refrain as they reso- 
lutely faced death, with the confident as- 
surance of immortality. The words are ver- 
bal equivalents of rifle-bullets and cannon- 
balls ; the tune is a noise, like the shriek 
of the shell as it ascends to the exact point 
whence it can most surely descend to blast 
and kill. Mrs. Howe's hymn has not this 
elemental character, but it is still wonder- 
fully animating and invigorating ; and the 
constant use of Scripture phrases shows 
the high level of thought and sentiment 
to which her soul had mounted, and from 
which she poured forth her exulting strains. 
" Our Country," " The Flag," " Our Orders," 
are also thoughtful or impassioned outbreaks 
of the same spiritual feeliug which gives vi- 
tality to the " Battle Hymn." 

The authors thus grouped together, differ- 
ing so widely as they do in the individuality 
impressed on their genius, are still connect- 
ed by that peculiar impulse given to Amer- 
ican literature by Channing's revolt against 
the Calvinistic view of human nature, and 
by the emphasis they all lay on the ethical 
sentiment, not merely in its practical appli- 
cation to the concerns of actual life, but as 
highly idealized in its application to that 
life which is called divine. In all the seri- 
ous efforts of these men and women of gen- 
ius human nature is glorified through its 
receptivity of influences which transcend 
the sphere of ordinary moral maxims, and 
touch whatever is aspiring, heroic, and holy 
in the human soul ; and though theology at 
first interposed objections, it has, on the 
whole, accepted the contributions made to 
its spiritual wealth by authors it was still 
compelled to consider as somewhat unau- 
thorized explorers of its special domain. 
There still remained a class of writers whom 
it could accept as men of letters, and whom 
it could not assail as impertinent intruders 
into its province. Charles Sprague was the 
earliest and most eminent of these. The 
new poetical metaphysics and theology had 
not touched the mind of this upholder of 
the school of Dryden, of Pope, of Goldsmith, 
of Gray, of Cowper, of Burns. His poem of 



SPRAGUE AND WILL 1 



L*$. 



377 



" Curiosity," delivered in 1829 before the Phi 
Beta Society of Harvard College, is so ex- 
cellent in description, in the various pictures 
it gives of human life, in the pungency of 
its wit and satire, that it deserves a place 
among the best productions of the school 
of Pope and Goldsmith. His odes are more 
open to criticism, though they contain many 
thoughtful, impassioned, and resounding 
lines. His " Shakspeare" ode is the best of 
these ; and he concludes it with a very felic- 
itous image, contrasting the success of the 
great poet of England in doing that which 
her statesmen and soldiers could not per- 
form: 

"Our Roman-hearted fathers broke 
Thy parent empire's galling yoke ; 
But thou, harmonious monarch of the mind, 
Around their sons a gentler chain shall bind. 
Still o'er our land shail Albion's sceptre wave, 
And what her mighty lion lost her mightier swan 
shall save." 

A more homely illustration of the fact that 
Shakspeare biuds the English race togeth- 
er whithersoever it wanders, is afforded by 
the remark of a sturdy New England farmer 
when he heard the rumor that England in- 
tended to make the Mason and Slidell affair 
an occasion for war with the United States, 
and thus insure success to the Confederates. 
The farmer paused, reflected, sought out in 
his mind something which would indicate 
his complete severance not only from the 
people of England, but from the English 
mind, and at last condensed all his wrath 
in this intense remark, " Well, if that report 
is true, all I can say is that Lord Lyons is 
welcome to my copy of Shakspeare." 

Perhaps Sprague's most original poems are 
those in which he consecrated his domestic 
affections. Wordsworth himself would have 
hailed these with delight. Any body who 
can read with unwet eyes "I See Still," 
"The Family Meeting," " The Brothers," and 
"Lines on the Death of M. S. C." is a critic 
who has as little perception of the language 
of natural emotion as of the reserves and 
refinements of poetic art. 

Sprague had the good fortune, as the 
cashier of a leading Boston bank, to be in- 
dependent of his poetic gifts, considered as 
means of subsistence. But Nathaniel Par- 
ker Willis was, perhaps, the first of our poets 
to prove that literature could be relied upon 
as a good business. He certainly enjoyed 



all those advantages which accompany com- 
petence, and the only bank he could draw 
upon was his brain. He thoroughly under- 
stood the art of producing what people de- 
sired to read, and for which publishers were 
willing to pay. His early Scripture sketch- 
es, written when he was a student of Yale, 
gave him the reputation of a promising gen- 
ius, and though the genius did not after- 
ward take the direction to which its first 
successes pointed, it gained in strength and 
breadth with the writer's advancing years. 
In his best poems he displayed energy both 
of thought and imagination ; but his pre- 
dominant characteristics were keenness of 
observation, fertility of fancy, quickness of 
wit, shrewdness of understanding, a fine 
perception of beauty, a remarkable felicity 
in the choice of words, and a subtle sense 
of harmony in their arrangement, whether 
his purpose was to produce melodious verse 
or musical prose. But he doubtless squan- 
dered his powers in the attempt to turn 
them into commodities. To this he was 
driven by his necessities, and he always 
frankly acknowledged that he could have 
done better with his brain had he possessed 
an income corresponding to that of other 
eminent American men of letters, who could 
select their topics without regard to the 
immediate market value of what they wrote. 
He became the favorite poet, satirist, and 
" organ" of the fashionable world. He wrote 
editorials, letters, essays, novels, which were 
full of evidences of his rare talent without 
doing justice to it. He idealized triviali- 
ties ; he gave a kind of reality to the un- 
real; and week after week he lifted into 
importance the unsubstautial matters which 
for the time occupied the attention of "good 
society." Some of his phrases, such as " the 
upper ten thousand," "Fifth-Ave-nudity," 
are still remembered. The paper which 
Willis edited, the Home Journal, exerted a 
great deal of influence. However slight 
might be the subjects, there cau be no ques- 
tion that the editor worked hard in bring- 
ing the resources of his knowledge, observa- 
tion, wit, and fancy to place them in their 
most attractive lights. The trouble was 
not in the vigor of the faculties, but in the 
thinness of much of the matter. As an ed- 
itor, however, Willis had an opportunity to 
display his grand generosity of heart, and 



378 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



the peculiar power lie bad of detecting the 
slightest trace of genius in writers who 
were the objects of his appreciative eulogy. 
In the whole history of American literature 
there is no other example of a prominent 
man of letters who showed, like Willis, such 
a passionate desire to make his natural in- 
fluence effective in dragging into promi- 
nence writers who either had no reputation 
at all, or whose reputation was notoriously 
less than his. Authors who have obtained 
reputation are commonly so much occupied 
in keeping or adding to it that they are not 
wont to take an active part in celebrating 
the merits of aspirants for renown. There 
must be scores of persons still living who 
remember with love and gratitude Willis's 
generous recognition of their first immature 
efforts, and all the more because at the time 
Willis's cordial praise, unlike that of an or- 
dinary notice in a newspaper or magazine, 
arrested public attention to their merits. 
As a poet, Willis still survives as the author 
of some of the most beautiful and graceful 
poems in our literature ; as a prose writer, 
he deserves a higher position than he now 
occupies, because nobody has yet attempted 
to separate the wheat from the chaff in his 
prose works ; as an interpretive critic, he is 
much underrated, not only because it is dif- 
ficult to estimate how much impulse he com- 
municated to other minds by his genial es- 
timate of their early promise, but because 
it is the fashion now to crush budding tal- 
ent rather than to encourage it. Many of 
our present critics are inspired not so much 
by taste as by distaste. Like Indian chiefs 
on the war-path, they glory in the number 
of scalps they have deftly detached from the 
heads of their victims. Perhaps it would 
be sentimental to bemoan the coarse mas- 
culine locks which cling to most of the scalps 
these gentlemen ostentatiously display as 
evidence of their skill ; but one thinks ad- 
miringly of the chivalry of Willis when he 
sees the fine hair of women triumphantly 
flourished in his eyes as an indication that, 
in invading the literary household, these 
critical " braves" are as regardless of sex as 
<>f age, and scalp maidens, wives, and moth- 
ers with the same impartial ferocity which 
leads them to scalp brothers, husbands, and 
fathers. 

James G. Percival had not Willis's happy 



disposition and adaptive talent. Though 
recognized by friends as a poet of the first 
(American) class, he never succeeded in in- 
teresting the great body of his intelligent 
countrymen in any but a few of his minor 
poems. He ranks among the great sorrow- 
ing class of neglected geniuses. A man of 
large though somewhat undigested erudi- 
tion, knowing many languages and many 
sciences, he was seemingly ignorant of the 
art of marrying his knowledge to his imagi- 
nation. When he wrote in prose, he was 
full of matter ; when he wrote in verse, he 
was full of glow and aspiration and fancy, 
but wanting in matter. Allston's imagined 
painter grinds up every thing he feels and 
knows " into paint ;" Tennyson and Long- 
fellow, as poets, do the same ; but Percival 
seems to have had no power of so melting 
and fusing his learning as to make it the 
auxiliary of his faucy, and thus give sub- 
stance to his poetic dreams. At least his 
best poems, however much they may charm 
the ear by their melody, and the eye by 
their flashing pictures of bits of natural 
scenery, are deficient in thought and in 
those burning or suggestive epithets which 
awake a whole train of associations in cul- 
tivated minds, and "make the burial-places 
of memory give up their dead." Hence the 
vagueness of the impression he leaves on 
the reader. It is sad, however, to think 
that neither his erudition nor his inspira- 
tion gave him a decent livelihood. Some 
infirmities of character, not vicious, may 
have led to this result. The period in which 
he lived was one in which no man of let- 
ters could, without shrewd management, 
be maintained by his writings alone. His 
failure as a poet is primarily due to the de- 
liberate disunion between what he knew 
and what he sang. At present, the poet 
is required to supply nutriment as well as 
stimulant. Tennyson's immense populari- 
ty, which makes every new poem from his 
pen a literary event, is to be referred not 
merely to his imaginative power, but to his 
keeping himself on a level with the science 
and scholarship of his age. "In Memoriam" 
would not have attracted so much atten- 
tion had it not been felt that the poet who 
celebrates a dead friend was, at the same 
time, all alive to the importance of prob- 
lems, now vehemently discussed by theolo- 



POE. 



y?y 



gians and scientists, which relate to the 
question of the reality and immortality of 
the human soul. Even the poet's affirma- 
tions are at present hesitatingly received if 
they do not imply a knowledge of the physi- 
ological science which seems to cast doubt 
on their validity. Emerson, also, is not more 
noted for his grand reliance on the soul than 
for his acquaintance with the scientific facts 
and theories which appear to deny its ex- 
istence. 

Edgar Allan Poe, like Willis and Perci- 
val, adopted, or was forced into, literature 
as a profession. Ho was a man of rare orig- 
inal capacity, cursed by an incurable per- 
versity of character. It can not be said he 
failed of success. The immediate recogni- 
tion as positive additions to our literature 
of such poems as " The Raven," " Annabel 
Lee," and " The Bells," and of such prose 
stories as " The Gold Bug," " The Purloined 
Letter," "The Murders of Rue Morgue," and 
"The Fall of the House of Usher," indi- 
cates that the public was not responsible 
for the misfortunes of his life. He also as- 
sumed the position of general censor and 
supervisor of American letters, and in this 
he also measurably succeeded ; for his crit- 
ical power, when not biased by his ca- 
prices, was extraordinarily acute, and dur- 
ing the period of his domination no critic's 
praise was more coveted than his, and no 
critic's blame more dreaded. In most of his 
literary work he displayed that rare com- 
bination of reason and imagination to which 
may be given the name of imaginative an- 
alysis. He was so proud of this power that 
he was never weary of unfolding, even to 
a chance acquaintance, the genesis of his 
poems and stories, accounting, on reason- 
able grounds, for every melodious variation 
in the verse, every little incident touched 
upon in the narrative, as steps in a deduct- 
ive argument from assumed premises. One 
of two things was necessary to quicken his 
mind into full activity. The first was ani- 
mosity against an individual ; the second 
was some chance suggestion which awaken- 
ed and tasked all the resources of his in- 
tellectual ingenuity. The wild, weird, un- 
earthly, wjiffer-natural, as distinguished from 
supernatural, element in his most popular 
poems and stories is always accompanied 
by an imagination which not only spiritu- 



ally discerns but relentlessly dissects. The 
morbid element, directing his powers, came 
from his character; the perfection of his 
analysis came from an intellect as fertile as 
it was calm, and as delicate in selecting 
every minute thread of thought as in seiz- 
ing every evanescent shade of feeling. Poe, 
as a writer, though admired by his own 
countrymen, is more highly appreciated in 
London and Paris than in New York and 
Philadelphia. He should have been a nat- 
uralized Frenchman, the associate of Meri- 
mee, De Musset, Gautier, and Baudileire, and 
been allowed to develop the unmoral but 
artistic character of his genius in a free 
way. In France his peculiar theory of 
practical as distinguished froni intellectual 
life would have been understood. In con- 
duct he justified all his escapes from moral 
rules by his theory of poetic ecstasy ; and 
he was irritated when any of his friends 
suggested that ecstasy, though laudable in 
the realm of imagination, was of doubtful 
.authority in the concerns of daily life. In 
Paris his adherence to a certain artistic 
mechanism in verse and prose would have 
condoned any improprieties he might have 
committed in carrying the fine frenzy, the 
bold promptings of the poetic instinct — the 
poetic ecstasy, in short — into such an insig- 
nificant matter as private conduct. And it 
is also to be remembered that Poe's esca- 
pades were only occasional. The worst 
thing in him was his perversity, which 
made many of the sincerest admirers of his 
genius unable to benefit him. The fact that 
he often needed assistance vexed him against 
those who were ready to afford it. To do 
him a favor was to run the risk of incurring 
his enmity. 

Bayard Taylor is justly esteemed as one 
of the most eminent of American men of 
letters. He is not a " self-made" man, for 
his books give evidence that the Lord had 
some share at least in making him ; but he 
is one of our best specimens of a self-edu- 
cated man. A graduate of no university, 
he has mastered many languages ; born in 
a Pennsylvania village, he may be said to 
have been every where and to have seen 
every body ; and all that he has achieved is 
due to his own persistent energy and tran- 
quil self-reliance. Journalist, traveler, es- 
sayist, critic, novelist, scholar, and poet, he 



380 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



has ever preserved the simplicity of nature 
which marked his first book of travels, and 
the simplicity of style which the knowledge 
of many lands and many tongues has never 
tempted him to abandon. His books of 
voyages and travels are charming, but their 
charm consists in the austere closeness of 
the words he uses to the facts he records, 
the scenery he depicts, and the adventures 
he narrates. The same simplicity of style 
characterizes his poems, his few novels, and 
numerous stories. The richness of his vo- 
cabulary never impels him to sacrifice truth 
of representation to the transient effective- 
ness which is readily secured by indulgence 
in declamation. One sometimes wonders 
that the master of so many languages should 
be content to express himself with such rig- 
id economy of word and phrase in the one 
he learned at his mother's knee. As a poet, 
though kindling with his theme, and with 
all the dictionaries at his beck, he ever dis- 
criminates between inspiration and aspira- 
tion. He ascends easily to that peak of 
imaginative contemplation or rapture which 
he has earned the right to occupy by expe- 
rience and character, and he would think it 
ridiculous to attempt to carry higher ele- 
vations, not by force of genius, but by dint 
of spasmodic ejaculations and a parade of 
resounding adjectives. Among Taylor's mi- 
nor poems, ifc is difficult to select those 
which exhibit his genius at its topmost 
point. Perhaps "Cainadeva" may be in- 
stanced as best showing his power of blend- 
ing exquisite melody with serene, satisfy- 
ing, uplifting thought. The song which 
begins with the invocation, "Daughter of 
Egypt, veil thine eyes !" is as good as could 
be selected from his many pieces to indi- 
cate the energy and healthiness of his lyric 
impulse. His longer poems would reward 
a careful criticism. The best of them is 
"The Masque of the Gods" — a poem com- 
prehensive in conception, noble in purpose, 
and admirable in style. Taylor has also 
done a great work in translating, or rath- 
er transfusing, the two parts of Goethe's 
"Faust" into various English metres corre- 
sponding to the original German verse, liter- 
al not only in reproducing ideas, but in re- 
producing melodies. This long labor could 
only have been undertaken by an American 
man of letters whose love of lucre was en- 



tirely subordinate to his love of literature. 
A few weeks devoted to lecturing before ly- 
ceums would have given him more visible 
returns in money than he could hope to ob- 
tain by the sale of this translation during 
the next twenty years. Longfellow and 
Bryant, men of property, could afford to 
translate Dante and Homer ; but Bayard 
Taylor devoted the leisure of ten years, gen- 
erally passed in what is called "getting a 
living," in giving English life to the greatest 
work of German genius. He is now en- 
gaged in a Life of Goethe which promises to 
be the best biography of the serene autocrat 
of German literature that has appeared ei- 
ther in German or English. Such unremu- 
nerated labors deliberately entered upon by 
a man who has depended upon his pen for 
his subsistence, who has never degraded his 
profession by pandering to any thing mean 
or base, and who has become popular only 
by means which do him honor, are worthy 
of a cordial recognition by every well-wish- 
er of American letters. 

Another American writer who has made 
literature a profession is George William 
Curtis. Mr. Curtis opened a new vein of 
satiric fiction in The Potiphar Papers, Prue 
and I, and Trumps ; but probably the great 
extent of his popularity is due to his papers 
in Harper's Magazine, under the general title 
of the Editor's Easy Chair. In these he has 
developed every faculty of his mind and 
every felicity of his disposition ; the large 
variety of the topics he has treated would 
alone be sufficient to prove the generous 
breadth of his culture ; but it is in the treat- 
ment of his topics that his peculiarly at- 
tractive genius is displayed in all its abun- 
dant resources of sense, knowledge, wit, 
fancy, reason, and sentiment. His tone is 
not only manly, but gentlemanly ; his per- 
suasiveness is an important element of his 
influence ; and no reformer has equaled him 
in the art of insinuating sound principles 
into prejudiced intellects by putting them 
in the guise of pleasantries. He can on 
occasion send forth sentences of ringing in- 
vective ; but in the Easy Chair he generally 
prefers the attitude of urbanity which the 
title of his department suggests. His style, 
in addition to its other merits, is rhythmic- 
al ; so that his thoughts slide, as it were, 
into the reader's mind in a strain of music. 



BANCROFT. 



381 



Not the least remarkable of his characteris- 
tics is the undiminished vigor and elastici- 
ty of his intelligence, in spite of the inces- 
sant draughts he has for years been making 
upon it. 

In the domain of history and biography, 
American literature, during the past fifty 
years, can boast of works of standard value. 
The most indefatigable of all explorers into 
the unpublished letters and documents il- 
lustrating the history of the United States 
was Jared Sparks. His voluminous editions 
of The Life and Writings of Washington and 
Franklin, his Diplomatic Correspondence of the 
Revolution, and other books devoted to the 
task of adding to the authentic materials of 
American history, are mines of information 
to the students of history ; but Mr. Sparks, 
though a clear and forcible writer, had not 
the gift of attractiveness ; and the results of 
his investigations have been more popularly 
presented by Irving, in his Life of Washing- 
ton, and Parton, in his Life of Franklin, than 
by his own biographies of those eminent men, 
based on the results of tireless original re- 
search extending through many years, and 
of which both Irving and Parton, with the 
usual polite display of gratitude to the 
drudge who had saved them from so much 
disgusting toil, gladly availed themselves in 
writing their more captivating biographies. 

In the political history of the country 
there only remain two " families," in the 
English sense of the term. These are the 
Adamses and the Hamiltons. Charles F. 
Adams has published a collection of his 
grandfather's works, in ten volumes, intro- 
duced by a life of John Adams, which is 
one of the most delightful of American 
biographies, and, at the same time, a posi- 
tive addition to the early history of the 
United States under our first two Presi- 
dents. An edition of Hamilton's works has 
also been published ; and one of Hamilton's 
sons has written a History of the Republic of 
the United States, " as traced in the writings 
of Alexander Hamilton and of his contem- 
poraries." It is needless to say that the 
controversies between the two families have 
added new matter of great value to the 
mass of documents which shed light on our 
early history as a united nation. 

It would be tedious .to enumerate other 
works, which are valuable contributions to 



our annals ; but, in 1834, George Bancroft 
appeared as the historian of the United 
States, or rather the historian of the process 
by which the States became united. He 
professed to have seized on the underlying 
Idea which shaped the destinies of the 
country ; in later volumes he indicated his 
initiation in the councils of Providence; 
and though his last volume (the tenth), pub- 
lished in 1874, only brings the history down 
to the conclusion of the Revolutionary war, 
his labor of forty years has confirmed him 
in his historical philosophy. Bancroft has 
been prominent in American politics during 
all this period ; he has been successively 
Collector of the port of Boston, Secretary 
of the Navy, American minister in London 
and Berlin, and has thus enjoyed every pos- 
sible advantage of correcting his declama- 
tion by his experience ; but his tendency 
to rhapsody has not diminished with the 
increase of his knowledge and his years. 
He has, to be sure, availed himself of every 
opportunity to add to the materials which 
enter into the composition of American his- 
tory, and has been as indefatigable in re- 
search as confident in theorizing. The dif- 
ferent volumes of his work are of various 
literary merit, but they are all stamped by 
the unmistakable impress of the historian's 
individuality. There is no dogmatism more 
exclusive than that of fixed ideas and ideals, 
and this dogmatism Mr. Bancroft exhibits 
throughout his history both in its declama- 
tory and speculative form. Indeed, there are 
chapters in each of his volumes which, con- 
sidered apart, might lead one to suppose that 
the work was misnamed, and that it should 
be entitled, " The Psychological Autobiog- 
raphy of George Bancroft, as Illustrated by 
Incidents and Characters in the Annals of 
the United States." Generally, however, his 
fault is not in suppressing or overlooking 
facts, but in disturbing the relations of facts 
— substituting their relation to the peculiar 
intellectual and moral organization of the 
historian to their natural relations with 
each other. Other eminent historians might 
be quoted as too apt to disturb the natural 
relations of things by the intrusion of their 
individual point of view ; but they so con- 
trive to diffuse their prepossessions through 
every part of the narrative that the conclu- 
sions they reach seem to be the inevitable 



382 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



result of their presentation of the facts. 
Mr. Bancroft begins with an emphatic state- 
ment of lofty abstractions, which his nar- 
rative by no means sustains. There is a 
palpable gulf between his tbeories and the 
realities he brings in to support his theories. 
This inartistic separation of thoughts from 
things deprives his history of the unity 
which we feel in reading such historians as 
Gibbon, Grote, and Macaiday. He is also 
accused of doing gross injustice to certain 
prominent Americans, and of refusing to 
correct his demonstrated mistakes. His pa- 
triotism, likewise, is sometimes of that kind 
which looks not so much to the glory of his 
country as to its glorification. Admitting, 
however, all the charges against him, it 
must still be said that he has written the 
most popular history of the United States 
(up to 1782) which has yet appeared, and 
that he has made a very large addition to 
the materials on which it rests. Perhaps 
he would not have been so tireless in re- 
search had he not been so passionately ear- 
nest in speculation. 

The necessarily slow progress of Mr. Ban- 
croft's history, and the various protests 
against his theories and his judgments, im- 
pelled Richard Hildreth, a bold, blunt, hard- 
headed, and resolute man, caustic in temper, 
keen in intellect, indefatigable in industry, 
and blessed with an honest horror of shams, 
to write a history of the United States, in 
which our fathers should be presented ex- 
actly as they were, " unbedaubed with pa- 
triotic rouge." The first volume was pub- 
lished in 1849, the sixth in 1852. The whole 
work included the events between the dis- 
covery and colonization of the continent 
and the year 1821. As a book of reference, 
this history still remains as the best in our 
catalogues of works on American history. 
The style is concise, the facts happily com- 
bined, the judgments generally good; and 
while justice is done to our great men, there 
is every where observable an almost vindic- 
tive contempt of persons who have made 
themselves " great" by the arts of the dem- 
agogue. Hildreth studied carefully all the 
means of information within his reach; but 
his plan did not contemplate original re- 
search on the large scale in which it was 
prosecuted by Bancroft. 

The History of New England, by John G. 



Palfrey, is distinguished by thoroughness 
of investigation, fairness of judgment, and 
clearness and temperance of style. It is 
one of the ablest contributions as yet made 
to our colonial history. The various histo- 
ries of Francis Parkman, Tlxe Conspiracy of 
Pontiac, The Pioneers of France in the New 
World, The Jesuits in North America, The Dis- 
covery of the Great West, exhibit a singular 
combination of the talents of the historian 
with those of the novelist. The materials 
he has laboriously gathered are disposed in 
their just relations by a sound understand- 
ing, while they are vivified by a realizing 
mind. The result is a series of narratives 
in which accuracy in the slightest details is 
found compatible with the most glowing ex- 
ercise of historical imagination, and the use 
of a style singularly rapid, energetic, and 
picturesque. 

William H. Prescott had one of those hap- 
pily constituted natures in which intellect- 
ual conscientiousness is in perfect harmony 
with the moral quality which commonly mo- 
nopolizes the name of conscience. He was 
as incapable of lies of the brain as of lies 
of the heart. When he undertook to write 
histories, he employed an ample fortune to 
obtain new materials, sifted them with the 
utmost care, weighed opposing statements 
in an understanding which was unbiased 
by prejudice, and, suppressing the laborious 
processes by which he had arrived at defi- 
nite conclusions, presented the results of his 
toil in a narrative so easy, limpid, vivid, and 
picturesque that his delighted readers hard- 
ly realized that what was so pleasiug and 
instructive to them could have cost much 
pain and labor to him. Echoes beyond the 
Atlantic, coming from England, France, Ger- 
many, Italy, and Spain, gradually forced the 
conviction into the ordinary American mind 
that the historian of Ferdinand and Isabel- 
la, of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru, of 
Philip the Second, had in his quiet Boston 
home made large additions to the history of 
Europe in one of its most important epochs. 
Humboldt was specially emphatic in his 
praise. Prescott was enrolled among the 
members of many foreign academies, whose 
doors were commonly shut to all who could 
not show that they had made contributions 
to human knowledge as well as to human 
entertainment. Much of his foreign repu- 



PRESCOTT AND MOTLEY. 



383 



tation was doubtless due to his lavish ex- 
penditure of uiouey to obtain rare books and 
copies of rare MSS. which contained novel 
and important facts ; but his wide popular- 
ity is to be referred to his possession of the 
faculty of historical imagination ; that is, 
his power of realizing and reproducing the 
events and characters of past ages, and of 
becoming mentally a contemporary of the 
persons whose actions he narrated. His 
partial blindness, which compelled him to 
listen rather than to read, and to employ a 
cunningly contrived apparatus in order to 
write, was in his case au advantage. He 
had the eyes of friends and faithful secreta- 
ries eager to serve him. What passed into 
his ear became an image in his mind, and his 
bodily infirmity quickened his mental sight. 
His judgment and imagination brooded over 
the throng of details to which he listened ; 
he formed a mental picture out of the dry 
facts; and by assiduous thinking he dis- 
posed the facts in their right relations with- 
out losing his hold on their vitality as pic- 
tures of a past age. People who passed him 
in his daily afternoon walks around Boston 
Common knew that his thoughts were busy 
on Ferdinand, or Cortez, or Pizarro, or Phil- 
ip, and not on the news of the day ; and his 
rapid pace and the peculiar swing of his 
cane as he trudged on indicated that he was 
looking not on what was imperfectly pres- 
ent to his bodily eye, but on objects to which 
physical exercise had given new life and sig- 
nificance as surveyed by the eye of his mind. 
His intense absorption in the subject-matter 
of his various histories gave to them a pe- 
culiar attractiveness which few novels pos- 
sess. Any body who, after reading Lew Wal- 
lace's recent romance of The Fair God, or Dr. 
Bird's Calarar, will then turn to Prescott's 
History of the Conquest of Mexico, can not fail 
to be impressed with the historian's superi- 
ority to the romancer in the mere point of 
romantic interest. 

Another American historian, John Lothrop 
Motley, the author of The Rise of the Dutch 
Republic, The History of the United Nether- 
lands, The History of John of Barnereld, and, 
it is to be hoped, of the great Thirty Years' 
War, has been, like Prescott, untiring in re- 
search, has made large additions to the facts 
of European history, has decisively settled 
many debatable questions which have tried 



the sagacity of French and German histo- 
rians of the sixteenth century, and has 
poured forth the results of his researches 
in a series of impassioned narratives, which 
warm the blood and kindle the imagination 
as well as inform the understanding. His 
histories are, in some degree, epics. As he 
frequently crosses Prescott's path in his 
presentation of the ideas, passions, and per- 
sons of the sixteenth century, it is curious 
to note the serenity of Prescott's narrative 
as contrasted with the swift, chivalric im- 
patience of wrong which animates almost 
every page of Motley. Both imaginatively 
reproduce what they have investigated; 
both have the eye to see and the reason 
to discriminate ; both substantially agree 
in their judgment as to events and char- 
acters ; but Prescott quietly allows his read- 
ers, as a jury, to render their verdict on the 
statement of the facts, while Motley some- 
what fiercely pushes forward to anticipate 
it. Prescott calmly represents; Motley in- 
tensely feels. Prescott is on a watch-tower 
surveying the battle ; Motley plunges into 
the thickest of the fight. In temperament 
no two historians could be more apart ; in 
j udgmeut they are identical. As both histo- 
rians are equally incapable of lying, Motley 
finds it necessary to overload his narrative 
with details which justify his vehemence, 
while Prescott can afford to omit them, on 
account of his reputation for a benign im- 
partiality between the opposing parties. A 
Eoman Catholic disputant would find it 
hard to fasten a quarrel on Prescott; but 
with Motley he could easily detect an occa- 
sion for a duel to the death. It is to be said 
that Motley's warmth of feeling never be- 
trays him into intentional injustice to any 
human being ; his histories rest on a basis 
of facts which no critic has shaken ; and to 
the merit of being a historian of wide re- 
pute, it is to be added that he has ever been 
a stanch friend, in the emergencies of the 
politics of the country, to every cause based 
on truth, honor, reason, freedom, and justice. 
The same high chivalrous tone which rings 
through his histories has been heard in ev- 
ery crisis of his public career. 

The European histories of Prescott and 
Motley required an introduction, and this 
was furnished by John Foster Kirk, in his 
History of Charles the Bold, Duke of Bur- 



384 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



gundy. The breaking up of the feudal sys- 
tem of Europe, and the gradual establish- 
ment of monarchies and states after the 
modern fashion, were the slow results of 
time. Prescott seized on an important 
point of this process in his History of Ferdi- 
nand and Isabella, as Robertson had in his 
History of Charles the Fifth, There remain- 
ed for a historian sufficiently robust in re- 
search and quick in intellect a domain of 
history still imperfectly investigated, name- 
ly, that of the struggles between Charles of 
Burgundy and Louis XI. of France, the lat- 
ter monarch being unquestionably the great 
disintegrating force which was brought to 
bear on the old feudal system. Mr. Kirk 
was one of the ablest, most scholarly, and 
most enthusiastic of Prescott's secretaries. 
He had the sagacity to perceive the im- 
portance of the period of which he proposed 
to write the history, and the perseverance 
to execute the difficult task. Charles and 
Louis were known to all people who spoke 
the English tongue by Scott's famous novel 
of Quentin Durward, and his feebler conclud- 
ing romance of Anne of Geierstein ; and Mr. 
Kirk had a right to suppose that an ac- 
count of an important era of European his- 
tory would lose none of its attractiveness 
by being rigidly conformed to historical 
facts. As to his research, it is sufficient 
to say that in his investigations in the 
archives of Switzerland alone he was proba- 
bly the first man to disturb the dust which 
nearly four centuries had heaped on pre- 
cious manuscript documents. As a thinker 
he is always ingenious, and as generally 
sound as he is original. In narrative, the 
richness of his materials, as in the case of 
Motley, tempts him sometimes into seeming- 
ly needless minuteness of detail. All our 
modern historians are open to this charge. 
It is hard, when a writer has devoted a week 
or a month to the discovery or verification 
of a fact, that he should be refused the grat- 
ification of devoting a sentence or a para- 
graph to its statement. The History of 
Charles the Bold is redundant in matter ; its 
three volumes might be judiciously con- 
densed into two ; but whether compression 
would add to its mere interest may be 
doubted. 

Among other works which do credit to 
the historical literature of the country may 



be named The Life and Correspondence of Na- 
thaniel Greene, from original materials, by 
George W. Greene — a work which, of its 
kind, is of the first class. The same writ- 
er's Historical View of the American Bcvolution 
is an excellent compend drawn from origi- 
nal sources. The various volumes of Rich- 
ard Frothingham are admirable for accu- 
racy and research. On the general subject 
of history, the elaborate work of Dr. John 
W. Draper, The History of the Intellectual 
Development of Europe, is comprehensive in 
scope, brilliant in style, and bold in specu- 
lation. The first volume of The History of 
France, by Parke Godwin, is so good that it 
is to be regretted the author has not con- 
tinued his task. The various biographies 
written by James Parton — namely, the lives 
of Burr, Jackson, Franklin, and Jefferson — 
have the great merit of being entertaining, 
while they rest on a solid basis of facts 
which the writer has diligently explored. 
His love of paradox, though a fault, cer- 
tainly gives piquancy to his lucid narrative. 
He starts commonly with a peculiar theory, 
and if sometimes unjust, the injustice comes 
from his surveying the subject from an ec- 
centric point of view, and not from any de- 
liberate intention to misstate facts or disturb 
their relations. The Life of Josiah Quincy, by 
his son, Edmund Quincy, is an admirably ex- 
ecuted portrait of one of the stoutest spec- 
imens of political manhood in American 
history. Like Parton, Quincy interests by 
reproducing the period of which he writes, 
and, like him, is a painter of " interiors." 
The Bise and Fall of the Slave Foiver in Amer- 
ica, by Henry Wilson, is the work of a man 
who as Senator of the United States was 
long in the thick of the fight against slav- 
ery, who knew by experience the thoughts, 
passions, and policies of the parties in the 
contest, and who wrote the history of the 
contest with simplicity, earnestness, and 
impartiality. The Life of Madison, by Will- 
iam C. Rives, is a work of interest and value. 
Among the antiquarians and anecdotists who 
have illustrated American history, the high- 
est reputation belongs to Benson J. Lossing 
and the family of the Drakes. 

In military history and biography, the 
most notable work the country has pro- 
duced is Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, 
Written by Himself — or, as it might be called, 



TICKNOR. 



385 



" My Deeds in My Words." The sharpness, 
conciseness, and arbitrariness of the auto- 
biographer's style are characteristic of the 
man. He is intensely conscious of his su- 
periority. The word of command is heard 
ringing in every page of his two octavos. 
No man could, without being laughed at, 
have written what he has written unless 
he had done what he has done. Through- 
out his autobiography he appears self-cen- 
tred, self-referring, self-absorbed, and, when 
opposed, prouder than a score of Spanish 
hidalgoes. Like George Eliot's innkeeper, 
he divides human thought into two parts, 
namely, " my idee," and " humbug ;" there is 
no middle point ; but then his intelligence is 
as solid, quick, broad, and full of resource as 
his will is defiantly self-reliant. Though 
there is something bare, bleak, harsh, abrupt, 
in his style, his blunt egotism every now and 
then runs into a rude humor. He pats on 
the back men as brave if not as skillful as 
himself, and- looks down upon them with 
good-natured toleration as long as they look 
up to him ; but when they do not, disbelief in 
Sherman denotes incompetency or maligni- 
ty in the critic. His enmities are hearted, 
and sometimes vindictive. The grave has 
closed over a man who in his sphere did at 
least as much as Sherman to overturn the 
rebellion, and yet Sherman spares not Secre- 
tary Stanton dead any more than he spared 
Stanton living. Still, the book is thorough- 
ly a soldier's book, and must take a rank 
among the most instructive and entertain- 
ing military memoirs ever written. 

In that department of history which de- 
scribes the rise and growth of literatures, 
the most important work which has been 
produced by an American scholar is The 
History of Spanish Literature, by George Tick- 
nor. As far as solid and accurate learning 
is concerned, it is incomparably the best his- 
tory of Spanish literature in existence, and 
is so acknowledged in Spain. The author, in 
his travels in Europe, sought out every book 
which shed the slightest light on his great 
subject. The materials of his work are a 
carefully selected Spanish library, purchased 
by himself. He deliberately took up the 
subject as a task which would pleasingly 
occupy a lifetime. The latest edition, pub- 
lished shortly after his death, showed that 
the volumes always were on his desk for 
25 ' 



supervision, revision, and the introduction 
of new facts, and that he continued pruning 
and enlarging his work to the day when 
the pen dropped from his hand. In research 
he was as indefatigable as he was consci- 
entious, and possessing ample leisure and 
fortune, he tranquilly exerted the powers of 
his strong understanding and the refine- 
ments of his cultivated taste in forming 
critical judgments, which, if somewhat pos- 
itive, had the positiveness of knowledge 
and reflection. Besides, his culture was 
cosmopolitan ; he had enjoyed as wide op- 
portunities for conversing with men as 
with books, and there was hardly an illus- 
trious European scholar or man of letters 
of his time with whom he had not been on 
terms of intimacy; but erudition can not 
confer insight, nor can genius be communi- 
cated by mere companionship with it. Mr. 
Ticknor's defect was a lack of sympathy 
and imagination, and, to the historian of 
literature, nothing can compensate for a de- 
ficiency in these. He could not mentally 
transform himself into a Spaniard, and 
therefore could not penetrate into the se- 
cret of the genius of Spain. He studied its 
great writers, but he did not look into and 
behold their souls. There was something 
cold, hard, resisting, and repellent in his 
mind. His criticism, therefore, externally 
judicious, had not for its basis mental facts 
vividly conceived and vitally interpreted. 
He never seemed to have made himself, in 
imagination,' an inhabitant of Spain ; to 
have felt the fine intoxication of its po- 
etic and romantic literature ; to have re- 
produced by sympathy the ecstasy of imag- 
inative creation ; to have hospitably taken 
into his mind all the strange moods of Span- 
ish thought and emotion ; to have been ge- 
nially receptive, in short, of impressions ab- 
solutely new to his own consciousness. With 
all his immense acquisitions, he used his 
knowledge somewhat legally. The external 
evidence was drawn from Spanish books; 
the judicial decisions bore unmistakable 
marks of having been delivered from his 
residence on Beacon Hill, Boston. Had Mr. 
Ticknor possessed the realizing imagination 
of his friend Prescott — who was never in 
Spain — he would have made what is now a 
valuable work, also a work of fascinating 
interest and extensive popularity. 



386 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



In the department of history may he in- 
cluded works on the origin, progress, or- 
ganization, comparison, and criticism of the 
religious ideas of various nations. Three 
works of this kind have been produced in 
the United States during the past twenty 
years, each of which indicates a " liberal" 
bias. The first is The History of the Doc- 
trine of a Future Life, by William R. Alger. 
This is a mine of generalized information, 
obtained by great labor, and sifted, ana- 
lyzed, and classified with care and skill. 
Indeed, it is said that some of the author's 
acquaintances, knowing the comprehensive- 
ness of the plan, and seeing year after year 
pass by without any signs of approaching 
publication, gently hinted to him that the 
book, as he was writing it, would only be 
finished in that state of existence which it 
took for its theme. The second is Oriental 
Religions, by Samuel Johnson, the product 
of a learned, intelligent, and intrepid " Free 
Religionist." The third is Ten Great Relig- 
ions, by James Freeman Clarke. The bold- 
ness of the thinking in these works is as 
noticeable as the abundance of the knowl- 
edge. 

The number of American statesmen who 
since 1810 have combined literary with po- 
litical talent is numerous — so numerous, in- 
deed, that, in despair of doing justice to all, 
we are forced to select three representative 
men as indicating three separate tendencies 
in our national life. These are John C. Cal- 
houn, Daniel Webster, and Charles Sumner. 
Calhoun specially followed the Jefferson 
who prompted the Resolutions of '98 ; Sum- 
ner, the Jefferson who wrote the Declara- 
tion of Independence; W T ebster, the men 
who drew up and carried into effect the 
Constitution of the United States. Calhoun 
was in politics what Calvin was in theolo- 
gy — a great deductive reasoner from prem- 
ises assumed. The austerity of his charac- 
ter found a natural outlet in the rigor of 
his logic. He had the graud audacity of 
the intellectual athlete, pushed his argu- 
mentation to its most extreme results, was 
willing to peril life and fortune on an in- 
ference ten times removed from his origi- 
nal starting-point, and was always a rea- 
soning being in matters where he seemed to 
be, on practical grounds, an unreasonable 
one. Despising rhetoric, he became a rhet- 



orician of a high class by pure force of log- 
ical statement. Every word he used meant 
something, and he never indulged in an im- 
age or illustration except to condense or en- 
force a thought. In the discussions in the 
Senate of the United States regarding the 
very foundations of the government, raised 
by what is called "Foote's Resolution," 
Webster, in 1830, made his celebrated speech 
in reply to Hayne. In all the resources of the 
orator — statement, reasoning, wit, humor, 
imagination, passion — this speech has, like 
one of the masterpieces of Burke, acquired 
reputation as a literary work, as well as by 
its lucid exposition of constitutional law. 
Webster was so completely victorious over 
his antagonist in argument as well as elo- 
quence, that only when the question of nul- 
lification came up was his triumph serious- 
ly questioned. Calhoun, who thought that 
Hayne had not made the most of the argu- 
ment for State rights, introduced, in Jan- 
uary, 1833, a series of resolutions into the 
Senate, carefully modeled on the Resolu- 
tions of '98, and afterward based an argu- 
ment upon them as though they were of a 
validity equal to that of the Constitution 
itself. The speech was one of the most re- 
markable efforts of his ingenious, penetra- 
ting, and logical mind, and can now be 
studied with admiration by every body who 
enjoys following the processes of impassion- 
ed deductive reasoning on a question af- 
fecting the life of individuals and of States. 
Webster's reply, called " The Constitution 
not a Compact between Sovereign States," 
was his greatest intellectual effort in the 
sphere of pure argumentation. Calhoun, a 
greater reasoner than Jefferson or Madison, 
had deduced *rom their propositions — orig- 
inally thrown out to serve as a convenient 
cover for a somewhat factious opposition to 
the administration of John Adams — a theo- 
ry of the government of the United States 
for all time to come. Webster resolutely 
attacked the premises of Calhoun's speech, 
and paid little attention to his opponent's 
deductive reasoning from the premises. Cal- 
houn retorted in a speech in which he com- 
plained that Webster had not answered his 
argument. It was not Webster's policy to 
discredit Madison, and he simply declared 
that Madison, in his old age, had repudiated 
such inferences as Calhoun had drawn from 



DANIEL WEBSTER. 



387 



the Resolutions of '98. On constitutional 
grounds Webster was as triumphant in his 
contest with Calhoun as he had been in his 
previous contest with Hayne; but argu- 
ments are of small account against interests 
and passions, and it required the bloodiest 
and most expensive of civil wars to prove 
that strictly logical deductions from the 
Resolutions of '98 did not express the mean- 
ing of the Constitution of the United States. 
The victory intellectually won was eventu- 
ally decided by " blood and iron." In addi- 
tion to Webster's extraordinary power of 
lucid statement, on which he based the suc- 
cessive steps and wide sweep of his argu- 
mentation, he was master of an eloquence 
unrivaled of its kind, because it represent- 
ed the kindling into unity of all the fac- 
ulties and emotions of a strong, deep, and 
broad individual nature. Generally, under- 
standing was his predominant quality; in 
statement and argument he seemed to be 
specially desirous to unite thougbt with 
facts ; he distrusted all rbetoric which dis- 
turbed the relations of things ; but in the 
heat of controversy he occasionally mount- 
ed to the real elevation of his character, and 
threw off flashes and sparks of impassion- 
ed imagination which had the electric, the 
smiting, effect of a completely roused na- 
ture. It is curious that he never exhibited 
the higher qualities of imagination in his 
speeches until the suppressed power flamed 
unexpectedly out after all his otber facul- 
ties had been thoroughly kindled, and then 
it came with formidable effect. Tbat Web- 
ster is one of the most eminent of our prose 
writers is acknowledged both at the North 
and the South. He was also a magnificent 
specimen of physical manhood; his mere 
presence in an assembly was eloquence ; and 
when he spoke, voice and gesture added im- 
mensely to the effect of his majestic port 
and bearing. Fox said of Lord Chancellor 
Thurlow that he must be an impostor, for no 
man could be as wise as he looked. Web- 
ster was wiser in look thau even Thurlow, 
but his works show that he was no impostor 
in the matter of political wisdom, laughable 
as are some of the epithets by which his 
admirers exaggerated his claims to rever- 
ence, as though he had clapped copyright 
on political thought. In the heathenism 
of partisan feeling, however, few deities of 



party were more worthy of apotheosis than 
"the godlike Dan!" 

Up to 1850, when he made his memorable 
" 7th of March speech" in the Senate, Webster 
was considered the leading champion of the 
non-extension of slavery ; but in that speech 
he waived the application of the principle to 
the Territories acquired by the Mexican war, 
though he contended that he still adhered 
to the principle itself. He lost, by this 
concession, his hold on the minds and con- 
sciences of the political antislavery men, 
and the position he vacated was eventually 
occupied by Charles Sumner, though Sum- 
ner had numerous competitors for that sta- 
tion of glory and difficulty. Webster must 
have foreseen the inevitable conflict be- 
tween the Slave and Free States, but he la- 
bored to postpone a catastrophe he was 
powerless to prevent, thinking that judi- 
cious compromise might soften the shock 
when the collision of irreconcilable princi- 
ples and persons could no longer be avoided. 
Sumner in heart was as earnest an aboli- 
tionist as Garrison or Phillips ; his soul was 
on fire with moral enthusiasm ; but he also 
had a vigorous understanding, and a memo- 
ry stored with a vast amount of historical 
and legal knowledge. He never forgot any 
thing he had read, and he passed not a day 
without reading. Accordingly, when he en- 
tered the Senate of the United States, this 
philanthropic student - statesman was as 
ready in citing the precedents as he was 
fiery in declaring the principles of freedom. 
During the years preceding the civil war 
the dominant party in the government was 
bent on establishing a slave power, which, 
had it succeeded, would have disgraced the 
country forever. Law, logic, philosophy, 
even theology, were in the South all subor- 
dinated to the permanence and extension 
of negro slavery, and hundreds of sermons 
south of Mason and Dixon's line inculcated 
the refreshing doctrine that if Christ came 
primarily on earth to save sinners, his sec- 
ondary, though not less important, object 
was to enslave " niggers." It is easy to 
say that it requires no parade of authori- 
ties to settle the proposition that two and 
two make four, but ethically and politically 
this was the proposition that Charles Sum- 
ner had to sustain by quotations from Vico 
and Leibnitz, from Coke, Mansfield, Camden, 



388 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



and Eldon, from Adams, Jefferson, Madison, 
Marshall, Story, and Webster. Those who 
were foiled in their purposes by these quo- 
tations from authorities they could not but 
respect, called him a pedant ; but what re- 
ally vexed them was that in no case in 
which this pedant encountered an opponent 
did he fail to justify his course by the ex- 
tent of his knowledge, as well as by the 
keenness of his intellect and the warmth of 
his sentiments. When the civil war broke 
out, he saw that negro slavery was doomed. 
In his endeavors to hasten emancipation he 
always contrived to make himself unaccept- 
able to the more prudent statesmen of his 
own party, by inaugurating measures which 
the course of events eventually compelled 
them to adopt ; and after the war he dragged 
the Repiiblican party up to his own policy 
of reconstruction, being in most cases only 
some six or twelve months ahead of what 
sober and judicious Republicans found at 
length to be the wisest course. Throughout 
his career Sumner was felt as a force as well 
as an intelligence, and probably the future 
historian will rank him high among the se- 
lect class of American public men who have 
the right to be called creative statesmen. 
He always courted obloquy, not only when 
his party was depressed, but when it was 
triumphant. " Forward !" was ever his mot- 
to. When his political friends thought they 
had at last found a resting-place, his voice 
was heard crying loudly for a new advance. 
Many of his addresses belong to that class 
of speeches which are events. His collected 
works, carefully revised by himself, have 
now become a portion of American litera- 
ture. They quicken the conscience of the 
reader, but they also teach him the lesson 
that moral sentiment is of comparatively 
small account unless it hardens into moral 
character, and is also accompanied by that 
thirst for knowledge by which intellect is 
broadened and enriched, and is trained to 
the task of supporting by facts and argu- 
ments what the insight of moral manliness 
intuitively discerns. Probably no states- 
man that the country has produced has ex- 
ceeded Sumner in his passion for rectitude. 
In every matter that came up for discussion 
he vehemently put the question, " Which of 
the two sides is Right ?" He so persistent- 
ly capitalized this tremendous monosylla- 



ble, and poured into its utterance such an 
amount of moral fervor or moral wrath, that 
the modest word, which every body used 
without much regard to its meaning, blazed 
out in his rhetoric, not as a feeble and faded 
truism, but as a dazzling and smiting truth. 
It is in discovering the hidden meaning of 
simple words that great men have often ex- 
hibited the full force of their genius. In 
the political history of the country nobody 
has excelled Sumner in restoring to its orig- 
inal majestic significance the much-abused 
term of "Right." 

A word may be said here of two public 
men, one of whom belongs to literature by 
cultivation and of set purpose, the other ac- 
cidentally and in the ordinary discharge of 
his public duties. Edward Everett was one 
of the most variously accomplished of the 
American scholars who have been drawn 
into public life by ambition and patriotism. 
Though he attained high positions, his na- 
ture was too sensitive and fastidious for the 
rough contentions of party, and he could 
not steel himself to bear calumny without 
wincing. He suffered exquisite mortifica- 
tion and pain at unjust attacks on his prin- 
ciples and character, whereas such attacks 
awakened in Sumner a kind of exultation, 
as they proved that his own blows were be- 
ginning to tell. As an orator, Everett's spe- 
cial gift was persuasion, not invective. The 
four volumes of his collected works are, in 
elegance and energy of style, wealth of in- 
formation, and fertility of thought, impor- 
tant contributions to American literature ; 
but being mostly in the form of speeches 
and addresses, they have not produced the 
impression which less learning, talent, and 
eloquence, concentrated on a few subjects, 
would assuredly have made. A very differ- 
ent man was Abraham Lincoln. He was a 
great rhetorician without knowing it. The 
statesman was doubtless astonished that 
messages and letters, written for purely 
practical purposes, should be hailed by fas- 
tidious critics as remarkable specimens of 
style. The truth was that Lincoln was de- 
ficient in fluency ; he was compelled to 
wring his expression out of the very sub- 
stance of his nature and the inmost life of 
the matter he had in haud ; and the result 
was seen in sinewy sentences, in which 
thoughts were close to things, and words 



THOREAU AND WHITMAN. 



389 



were close to thoughts. And finally, in 
November, 1863, his soul devoutly impressed 
with the solemnity and grandeur of his 
theme, he delivered at Gettysburg an ad- 
dress of about twenty lines, which is con- 
sidered the top and crown of American elo- 
quence. 

There are certain writers in American lit- 
erature who charm by their eccentricity as 
well as by their genius, who are both origi- 
nal and originals. The most eminent, per- 
haps, of these was Henry D.Thoreau — a man 
who may be said to have penetrated nearer 
to the physical heart of nature than any 
other American author. Indeed, he " expe- 
rienced" nature as others are said to expe- 
rience religion. Lowell says that in reading 
him it seems as " if all out-doors had kept a 
diary, and become its own Montaigne." He 
was so completely a naturalist that the in- 
habitants of the woods in which he sojourn- 
ed forgot their well-founded distrust of 
man, and voted him the freedom of their 
city. His descriptions excel even those of 
Wilson, Audubon, and Wilson Flagg, ad- 
mirable as these are, for he was in closer 
relations with the birds than they, and car- 
ried no gun in his hand. In respect to hu- 
man society, he pushed his individuality to 
individualism ; he was never happier than 
when absent from the abodes of civiliza- 
tion ; and the toleration he would not 
extend to a Webster or a Calhoun, he ex- 
tended freely to a robin or a woodchuck. 
With all this peculiarity, he was a poet, a 
scholar, a humorist ; also, in his way, a phi- 
losopher and philanthropist ; and those who 
knew him best, and entered most thoroughly 
into the spirit of his character and writings, 
are the warmest of all the admirers of his 
genius. Another Concord hermit is W. E. 
Channing, who has adopted solitude aj a 
profession, and seclusion from his kind as 
the condition of independent perception 
of nature. The thin volume of poems in 
which he has embodied his insights and 
experiences contains lines and verses which 
are remarkable both for their novelty and 
depth. A serener eccentric, A. Bronson Al- 
cott, is eccentric only in this, that he thinks 
the object of life is spiritual meditation ; that 
all action leads up to this in the end ; and 
he has spent his life in tranquilly exploring 
those hidden or elusive facts of the higher 



consciousness which practical thinkers over- 
look or ignore. He is a Yankee seer who 
has suppressed every tendency in his Yan- 
kee nature toward "argufying" a point. 
Very different from all these is Walt Whit- 
man, who originally burst upon the literary 
world as " one of the roughs," and whose 
" barbaric yawp" was considered by a par- 
ticular class of English critics as the first 
original note which had been struck in 
American poetry, and as good as an Indian 
war-whoop. Wordsworth speaks of Chat- 
terton as " the marvelous boy ;" Walt Whit- 
man, in his first Leaves of Grass, might have 
been styled the marvelous " b'hoy." Walt 
protested against all convention, even all 
forms of conventional verse ; he seemed 
to start up from the ground, an earth-born 
son of the soil, and put to all cultivated 
people the startling question, "What do 
you think of Me V They generally thought 
highly of him as an original. Nothing is 
more acceptable to minds jaded with read- 
ing works of culture than the sudden ap- 
pearance of a strong, rough book, expressing 
the habits, ideas, and ideals of the uncul- 
tivated ; but unfortunately Whitman de- 
clined to listen to the suggestion that his 
daring disregard of convention should have 
one exception, and that he must modify his 
frank expression of the relations of the sexes. 
The author refused, and the completed edi- 
tion of the Leaves of Grass fell dead from 
the press. Since that period he has un- 
dergone new experiences ; his latest books 
are not open to objections urged against 
his earliest ; but still the Leaves of Grass, 
if thoroughly cleaned, would even now be 
considered his ablest and most original 
work. But when the first astonishment 
subsides of such an innovation as Walt 
Whitman's, the innovator pays the penal- 
ty of undue admiration by unjust neglect. 
This is true also of Joaquin Miller, whose 
first poems seemed to threaten all our es- 
tablished reputations. Each succeeding vol- 
ume was more coldly received ; and though 
the energy and glow of his verse were the 
same, the public, in its calmer mood, found 
that the richness of the matter was not up 
to the rush of the inspiration. 

This eccentric deviation from accredited 
models is perhaps best indicated in Ameri- 
can humorists, whose characteristic is ludi- 



390 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



crous absurdity. George H. Derby (or John 
Phoenix) was perhaps the first who carried 
the hyperboles of humor to the height of 
humoristic extravaganzas. There are few 
men who have roused a greater number 
of irresistible bursts of laughter from so 
limited a number of humorous sketches. 
Indeed, many of his readers have his whole 
works by heart, and never recur to them 
without honoring his memory by a fresh 
outbreak of merriment. The peculiarity of 
the whole school is to revel in the most 
fantastic absurdities of an ingenious fancy. 
There is a Western story told of a man who 
was so strong that his shadow once falling 
on a child instantly killed it. This is the 
kind of humor in which Americans excel. 
Charles F. Browne (Artemus Ward), indul- 
ging at his will in the oddest and wildest 
caricatures, still contrived to make his show- 
man an original character, and to stamp on 
the popular imagination an image of the 
man, as well as to tickle the risibilities of 
the public by his sayings and doings. Per- 
haps the most delicious among his many de- 
licious absurdities was his grave statement 
that it had been better than ten dollars in 
Jeff Davis's pocket "if he'd never been born." 
S. L. Clemens (Mark Twain), the most wide- 
ly popular of this class of humorists, is a 
man of wide experience, keen intellect, and 
literary culture. The serious portions of 
his writings indicate that he could win a 
reputation in literature even if he had not 
been blessed with a humorous fancy inex- 
haustible in resource. He strikes his most 
effective satirical blows by an assumption 
of helpless innocence and bewildered for- 
lornness of mind. The reader or the audience 
is in convulsions of laughter, while he pre- 
serves an imperturbable serenity of counte- 
nance, as if wondering why his statement is 
not received as an important contribution 
to human knowledge. Occasionally he in- 
dulges in a sly and subtle stroke of humor, 
worthy of the great masters, and indicating 
that his extravagancies are not the limit of 
his humorous faculty. D. R. Locke (Petro- 
leum V. Nasby) is not only a humorist, but 
he was a great force in carrying the recon- 
struction measures of the Republican party, 
after the war, by his laughable but coarse, 
broad, and merciless pictures of the lowest 
elements in the Western States that had 



been opposed to the policy of equal justice. 
The Nasby Papers are exceedingly amusing ; 
they are also evidently the work of a man of 
clear intelligence, and to the future histori- 
an they will doubtless be considered as exert- 
ing an influence on the popular mind much 
greater than that exerted by the speeches 
of many eminent legislators. Though they 
seem to be extravagant caricatures, the au- 
thor is understood to insist on their substan- 
tial truth to fact. His latest satire is on 
paper money ; its greatest hit is Mr. Nasby's 
statement that he did not issue fractional 
currency, because it was as easy to print a 
hundred-dollar bill as one for fifty cents. 
H. W. Shaw (Josh Billings) is a humorist of 
such bright glimpses of practical perception 
and insight that one wonders why he strives 
to vulgarize his sagacity by bad spelling. 
Charles G. Leland, an accomplished man of 
letters, the hest translator of the most dif- 
ficult pieces of Heine, has won a large 
reputation by his Hans Breitmann Ballads, 
Hans being a lyrist who sings seemingly 
from the accumulated inspiration drawn 
from tuns of lager- beer. B. P. Shillaber, 
not so prominent as others we have named, 
has given a new life to Mrs. Partington, and 
has added Ike to the family. While he par- 
ticipates in the extravagance of the popu- 
lar American humorists, he has a demure 
humane humor of his own which is quite 
charming. It would be impossible in our 
brief space to note all the writers who have 
followed, with more or less ingenuity of in- 
tellect, in what seems to be the most direct 
road to American renown. 

Among those authors who combine hu- 
mor with a variety of other gifts, the most 
conspicuous is F. Bret Harte. His subtilty 
of ethical insight, his depth of sentiment, 
his power of solid characterization, and his 
pathetic and tragic force are as evident as 
his broacl perception of the ludicrous side 
of things. In his California stories, as in 
some of his poems, he detects "the soul of 
goodness in things evil," and represents 
the exact circumstances in which ruffians 
and profligates are compelled to feel that 
they have human hearts and spiritual na- 
tures. He is original not only in the or- 
dinary sense of the word, but in the sense 
of discovering a new domain of literature, 
and of colonizing it by the creations of his 



HAY, HOWELLS, AND ALDRICH. 



391 



own brain. Perhaps the immense popu- 
larity of some of his humorous poems, such 
as " The Heathen Chinee," has not been fa- 
vorable to a full recognition of his graver 
qualities of heart and imagination. 

John Hay is, like Bret Harte, a humorist, 
and his contributions, in Pike County Bal- 
lads, to what may be called the poetry of 
ruffianism, if less subtile in sentiment and 
characterization than those of his model, 
have a rough raciness and genuine manli- 
ness peculiarly his own. His delightful 
volume called Castilian Days, displaying all 
the graces of style of an accomplished man 
of letters, shows that it was by a strong ef- 
fort of imagination that he became for a 
time a mental denizen of Pike County, and 
made the acquaintance of Jim Bludso, and 
other worthies of that kind. 

The writings of William D. Howells are 
masterpieces of literary workmanship, re- 
sembling the products of those cunning 
artificers who add one or two thousand per 
cent, to the value of their raw material by 
their incomparable way of working it up. 
What they are as artisans, he is as artist. 
His faculties and emotions are in exquisite 
harmony with each other, and unite to pro- 
duce one effect of beauty and grace in the 
singular felicity of his style. He has humor 
in abundance, but it is so thoroughly blend- 
ed with his observation, fancy, imagination, 
taste, and good sense, that it seems to es- 
cape from him in light, demure, evanescent 
flashes rather than in deliberate efforts to 
be funny. He has revived in some degree 
the lost art of Addison, Goldsmith, and Ir- 
ving. Nobody ever "roared" with laugh- 
ter in reading any thing he ever wrote ; but 
few of our American humorists have ex- 
celled him in the power to unseal, as by a 
magic touch, those secret interior springs 
of merriment which generally solace the 
soul without betraying the happiness of the 
mood they create by any exterior bursts of 
laughter. His Venetian Life, Italian Jour- 
neys, Suburban Sketches — his novels, entitled 
Our Wedding Journey, A Chance Acquaintance, 
and A Foregone Conclusion — all indicate the 
presence of this delicious humorous element, 
penetrating his picturesque descriptions of 
scenery, as well as his refined perceptions 
of character and pleasing narratives of in- 
cidents. His prose style, with its "polished 



want of polish," and elaborate, deliberate 
simplicity, is marked not only by felicities 
of diction, but by the continual oversight 
of an exacting taste. Indeed, the story goes 
that when, as editor of The Atlantic Monthly, 
he incurred the ire of a rejected contributor, 
the latter was consoled by the remark of 
Howells that he frequently rejected his own 
contributions when he found that they did 
not satisfy his austere editorial judgment. 

Charles Dudley Warner, like Howells, is 
an author whose humor is intermixed with 
his sentiment, understanding, and fancy. In 
My Summer in a Garden, Back-log Studies, and 
other volumes he exhibits a reflective intel- 
lect under the guise of a comically sedate 
humor. Trifles are exalted into importance 
by the incessant play of his meditative fa- 
cetiousness. 

Thomas Bailey Aldrich first won his rep- 
utation as a poet. In the exquisite ballad 
of " Babie Bell," and in other poems, he has, 
as it were, so dissolved thought and feeling 
in melody that rhyme and rhythm seem to 
be necessary and not selected forms of ex- 
pression. As a prose writer he combines 
pungency with elegance of style, and in his 
stories has exhibited a sly original vein of 
humor, which, Avhile it steals out in separate 
sentences, is most effectively manifested in 
the ludicrous shock of surprise which the 
reader experiences when he comes to the ca- 
tastrophe of the plot. In this respect Mar- 
jorie Daw is one of the best prose tales in 
our literature. Aldrich has written many 
others constructed on a similar plan, and 
almost equally attractive. His Story of a 
Bad Boy belongs to the class of juvenile 
works, and it is a charming satire on the 
" do-me-good" narratives which are so copi- 
ously supplied for the improvement and de- 
lectation of American lads. 

Among the American novelists who have 
risen into prominence during the past thir- 
ty years, the greatest, though not the most 
popular, is Nathaniel Hawthorne. His first 
romance, The Scarlet Letter j did not appear 
until the year 1850, but previously he had 
published collections of short stories under 
the titles of Twice-told Tales and Mosses from 
an Old Manse. These were recognized by ju- 
dicious readers all over the country as mas- 
terpieces of literary art, but their circula- 
tion was ludicrously disproportioned to their 



392 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



merit. For years one of the greatest mod- 
ern masters of English prose was valued at 
his true worth only by those who had found 
by experience in composition how hard it is 
to be clear and simple in style, and at the 
same time to be profound in sentiment, ex- 
act in thought, and fertile in imagination. 
Most of these short stories contain the germs 
of romances, and a literary economist of his 
materials, like Scott or Dickens, would have 
expanded Hawthorne's hints of passion and 
character into thrilling novels. The Scarlet 
Letter, the romance by which Hawthorne 
first forced himself on the popular mind as 
a genius of the first class, was but the ex- 
pansion of an idea expressed in three sen- 
tences, written twenty years before its ap- 
pearance, in the little sketch of " Endicott 
and the Cross," which is included in the col- 
lection of Twice-told Tales. But The Scarlet 
Letter exhibited in startling distinctness all 
the resources of his peculiar mind, and even 
more than Scott's Bride of Lammermoor it 
touches the lowest depths of tragic woe and 
passion — so deep, indeed, that the represen- 
tation becomes at times almost ghastly. If 
Jonathan Edwards, turned romancer, had 
dramatized his sermon on "Sinners in the 
Hand of an Angry God," he could not have 
written a more terrific story of guilt and 
retribution than The Scarlet Letter. The pit- 
iless intellectual analysis of the emotions of 
guilty souls is pushed so far that the read- 
er, after being compelled to sympathize with 
the Puritanic notion of Law, sighs for some 
appearance of the consoling Puritanic doc- 
trine of Grace. Hawthorne, in fact, was a 
patient observer of the operation of spi rit- 
ual laws, and relentless in recording the re- 
sults of his observations. Most readers of 
romances are ravenous for external events ; 
they demand that the heroes and heroines 
shall be swift in thought, confident in de- 
cision, rapid in act. In Hawthorne's novels 
the events occur in the hearts and minds of 
his characters, and our attention is fastened 
on the ecstasies or agonies of individual 
souls rather than on outward acts and inci- 
dents; at least, the latter appear trivial in 
comparison with the inward mental states 
they imperfectly express. Carlyle says that 
real genius in characterization consists in 
developing character from " within out- 
ward." Hawthorne's mental sight in dis- 



cerning souls is marvelously penetrating 
and accurate, but he finds it so difficult to 
give them an adequate physical embodi- 
ment that their very flesh is spiritualized, 
and appears to be brought into the repre- 
sentation only to give a kind of phantasmal 
form to purely mental conceptions. These 
souls, while intensely realized as individu- 
als, are, however, mere puppets in the play 
of the spiritual forces and laws behind 
them, and while seemingly gifted with will, 
even to the extent of indulging in all the ca- 
prices of willfulness, they drift to their doom 
with the certainty of fate. In this twofold 
power of insight into souls, and of the spir- 
itual laws which regulate both the natu- 
ral action and morbid aberrations of souls, 
Hawthorne is so incomparably great that 
in comparison with him all other romancers 
of the century, whether German, French, 
English, or American, seem to be superficial. 
The defect of his method was that he pene- 
trated to such a depth into the human heart, 
and recorded so mercilessly its realities and 
possibilities of sin and selfishness as they 
appeared to his piercing, passionless vision 
of the movements of passion, that he rather 
frightened than pleased the ordinary novel- 
reader. The old woman who sagely con- 
cluded that she must be sick, because in 
reading the daily newspaper she did not, as 
was her wont, " enjoy her murders," uncon- 
sciously hit on the distinction which sepa- 
rates artistic representations of human life 
which include crime and misery from those 
representations in which the prominence 
of crime and misery is so marked as to be- 
come unpalatable. Hawthorne did not suc- 
ceed in making his psychological pictures 
of sin and woe "enjoyable." The intensity 
of impassioned imagination which flames 
through every page of The Scarlet Letter was 
unrelieved by those milder accompaniments 
which should have been brought in to soft- 
en the effect of a tragedy so awful in itself. 
Little Pearl, one of the most exquisite cre- 
ations of imaginative genius, is introduced 
not to console her parents, but, in her wild, 
innocent willfulness, to symbolize their sin, 
and add new torments to the slow-consum- 
ing agonies of remorse. The Scarlet Letter is 
incidentally the strongest of all arguments 
against the heresy of " free love." In The 
House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedalc Bo- 



HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 



393 



mance, and The Marble Fait n, Hawthorne deep- 
ened the impression made by his previous 
writings that he did not possess his genius, 
but was possessed by it. The most powerful 
of his creations of character were inspired 
not by his sympathies, but his antipathies. 
Personally he was the most geutle and 
genial and humane of men. He detested 
many of the characters in whose delinea- 
tion he exerted the full force of his intel- 
lect and imagination ; but he was so men- 
tally conscientious that he never exercised 
the right of the novelist to kill the person- 
ages who displeased him at his own will 
aud pleasure. So intensely did he realize 
his characters that to run his pen through 
them, and thus blot them out of existence, 
would have seemed to him like the commis- 
sion of willful murder. He watched and 
noted the operation of spiritual laws on the 
malignant or feeble souls he portrayed, but 
never interfered personally to divert their 
fatal course. In thus emphasizing the trag- 
ic element in Hawthorne's genius, we may 
have too much overlooked his deep and del- 
icate humor, his ingenuity of playful fancy, 
his felicity in making a landscape visible 
to the soul as well as the eye by his charm- 
ing power of description, and the throng of 
thoughts which accompany every step in 
the progress of his narrative. Not the least 
remarkable characteristic of this remarka- 
ble man was the prevailing simplicity, clear- 
ness, sweetness, purity, and vigor of his style, 
even when his subjects might have justified 
him in deviating into some form of Carlylese. 
The most widely circulated novel ever 
published in this country, or perhaps in any 
other, is Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Mrs. Harriet 
Beecher Stowe. The book has in the Unit- 
ed States attained a sale of over 350,000 cop- 
ies, and after the lapse of twenty-four years 
the demand for it still continues. It has 
been translated into almost every known 
language. Inspired by the insurrection of 
the public conscience against the Fugitive 
Slave Law, its popularity has survived the 
extinction of slavery itself. Its original 
publication, in 1852, was an important po- 
litical event. It practically overturned the 
arguments of statesmen and decisions of ju- 
rists by an irresistible appeal to the heart 
and imagination of the American people. It 
was one of the most powerful agencies in 



building up the Republican party, in elect- 
ing Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency, and 
in raising earnest volunteers for the great 
crusade agaiust slavery. This effect was 
produced not by explosions of moral wrath 
against the iniquity it assailed, not by 
righteous vituperation of the liberticides 
who meanly lent themselves to the sup- 
port of the slave power, but by a vivid 
dramatic presentation of the facts of the 
case, in which complete justice was done 
equally to the slave-holder and the slave. 
And the humor, the pathos, the keen obser- 
vation, the power of characterization, dis- 
played in the novel were all penetrated by 
an imagination quickened into activity by 
a deep and hiunaue religious sentiment. 
Next to Uncle Tom, The Minister's Wooing is 
the best of Mrs. Stowe's novels. Her Old- 
town Folks and Sam Lawson's Stories are fall 
of delightful Yankee humor. 

It is impossible for us to spare the space 
for even an inadequate notice of all the nov- 
elists of the United States. At the time 
(1827) Miss Catharine M. Sedgwick publish- 
ed Hope Leslie she easily took a prominent 
position in our literature, in virtue not only 
of her own merits, but of the comparative 
absence of competitors. Since then there 
has appeared a throng of writers of roman- 
tic narratives, and the number is constantly 
increasing. We are compelled to confine 
our remarks to a few of the representative 
novelists. William Ware gained a just rep- 
utation by his Letters from Palmyra (1836). 
The style is elegant, the story attractive, 
and the pictures of the court of Zenobia are 
represented through a visionary medium 
which gives to the representation a certain 
charming poetic remoteness. Charles Fen- 
no Hoffman, a poet as well as prose writer, 
whose song of " Sparkling and Bright" has 
probably rung over the emptying of a mill- 
ion of Champagne bottles, was a man who 
delighted in "wild scenes in forest and prai- 
rie," and whose Greyslaer shows the energy 
of his nature, as well as the brilliancy of his 
intellect. R. B. Kimball is noted for his 
business novels, and his heart-breaks come 
not from failures in love, but from failures 
in traffic. Donald G. Mitchell, in his Rev- 
eries of a Bachelor, originated a new style, 
in which a certain delightful daintiness of 
sentiment was combined with a fertile fancy 



394 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



and touches of humorous good sense. Syl- 
vester Judd, a Unitarian clergyman, went 
into the great lumber region of Maine, and 
came out of it to record his observations, 
experiences, and insights in the novel of 
Margaret, which Lowell once affirmed to be 
the most intensely American book ever writ- 
ten. Thomas W. Higginson, distinguished 
in many departments of literature for the 
thoroughness of his culture and the classic 
simplicity and elegance of his style, is the 
author of a novel called Malbone, quite not- 
able for beauty of description, ingenuity of 
plot, and subtilty of characterization. Her- 
man Melville, after astonishing the public 
with a rapid succession of original novels, 
the scene of which was placed in the islands 
of the Pacific, suddenly dropped his pen, as 
if in disgust of his vocation. Mrs. Harri- 
et Prescott Spofford is the author of many 
thrilling stories, written in a style of per- 
haps exaggerated splendor, but in which 
prose is flushed with all the hues of poetry. 
Maria S. Cummins published in 1854 a nov- 
el called The Lamplighter, which attained an 
extraordinary popularity, owing to the sim- 
plicity, tenderness, pathos, and naturalness 
of the first hundred pages. Seventy thou- 
sand copies were sold in a year. Miss E. S. 
Phelps, in her Gates Ajar, Hedged In, and in 
a variety of minor tales, has exhibited a 
power of intense pathos which almost pains 
the reader it melts. Henry James, Jun. — 
long may it be before the "Jun." is detached 
from his name! — has a deep and delicate 
perception of the internal states of excep- 
tional individuals, and a quiet mastery of 
the resources of style, which make his sto- 
ries studies in psychology as well as models 
of narrative art. J. W. De Forest, the au- 
thor of Kate Beaumont and other novels, is a 
thorough realist, whose characterization, an- 
imated narrative, well-contrived plots, and 
pitiless satire only waut the relief of ideal 
sentiment to make them as pleasing as they 
are powerful. Edward Everett Hale, the 
author of The Man without a Country, My Dou- 
ble, and How he Undid Me, and Sybaris and 
Other Homes, is fantastically ingenious in the 
plan and form of his narratives, but he uses 
his ingenuity in the service of good sense 
and sound feeling, while he inspires it with 
the impulses of a hopeful, vigorous, and elas- 
tic spirit. Miss Louisa M. Alcott, in her Lit- 



tle JVoinen and Little Men, has almost revolu- 
tionized juvenile literature by the audacity 
of her innovations. She thoroughly under- 
stands that peculiar element in practical 
youthful character which makes romps of 
so many girls aud "roughs" of so many boys. 
Real little women and real little men look 
into her stories as into mirrors in order to get 
an accurate reflection of their inward selves. 
She has also a tart, quaint, racy, witty good 
sense, which acts on the mind like a tonic. 
Her success has been as great as her rejec- 
tion of conventionality in depicting lads 
and lasses deserved. Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney 
has more sentiment and a softer manner of 
representation than Miss Alcott; but she has 
originality, though of a different kind ; and 
her books, like those of Miss Alcott, have 
penetrated into households in every part 
of the country, and their characters have 
been domesticated at thousands of firesides. 
Faith Gartney especially is a real friend and 
acquaintance to many a girl who has no 
other. William G. Simms, the most prolific 
of American historical novelists, and in tire- 
less intellectual energy worthy of all re- 
spect, failed to keep his hold on the popular 
mind by the absence in his vividly described 
scenes of adventure of that peculiar some- 
thing which gives to such scenes a perma- 
nent charm. Theodore Winthrop, the au- 
thor of Cecil Dreeme, John Brent, and other 
striking and admirable tales, rose suddenly 
into popularity, and as suddenly declined — 
a conspicuous instance of the instability of 
the romancer's reputation. J. G. Holland 
has succeeded in every thing he has under- 
taken, whether as a sort of lay preacher to 
the young, as an essayist, as a novelist, or 
as a poet. It is hardly possible to take up 
any late edition of any one of his numerous 
volumes without finding " fortieth thousand" 
or " sixtieth thousand" smiling complacent- 
ly and benignly upon you from the title- 
page. Both in verse and prose he has ad- 
dressed the bourgeoisie of readers, disdain- 
ing to court the proletariat, and disregard- 
ing the fleers of the patricians. Mrs. Mary 
J. Holmes, the author of Lena Rivers, Mrs. 
Terhuue (Marian Harland), the author of 
Hidden Path, Mrs. Augusta Evans Wilson, 
the author of St. Elmo, are novelists very 
different from Dr. Holland, yet whose works 
have obtained a circulation corresponding 



INDIVIDUAL POEMS. 



395 



in extent. We pause here in reading the 
list, not for want of subjects, hut for want 
of space, and also, it must he confessed, for 
want of epithets. 

It is a great misfortune that the temp- 
tation which besets clever people to write 
mediocre verses, and afterward to collect 
them in a volume, is irresistible. Time, and 
short time at that, proves the truth of Mr. 
Jonathan Oldbuck's remark, that " your fu- 
gitive poetry is apt to become stationary 
with the publisher." Even when a little 
momentary reputation is acquired, the writ- 
ers are soon compelled to repeat mournful- 
ly the refrain of Pierpout's beautiful and 
pathetic poem, " Passing away ! passing 
away !" It is not one of the least mysteries 
of this mismanagement of talent that the 
want of public recognition does not ap- 
pease the desire to attain it. As a gener- 
al rule, books of verses, even good verses, 
are the most unsalable of human products. 
There are numerous cases where genuine 
poetic faculty and inspiration fail to make 
the slightest impression on the public im- 
agination. The most remarkable instance 
of this kind in our literature is found in the 
case of Mrs. Maria Brooks (Maria del Occi- 
dente), who printed, some forty years ago, a 
poem called " Zophiel, or the Bride of Sev- 
en," which Southey warmly praised, which 
was honored with a notice in the London 
Quarterly Review, which deserved most of 
the eulogy it received, which fell dead from 
the press, and which not ten living Amer- 
icans have ever read. Again, some of the 
most popular and most quoted poems in our 
literature are purely accidental hits, and 
their authors are rather nettled than pleased 
that their other productions should be neg- 
lected while such prominence is given to 
one. Thus it might be somewhat danger- 
ous now to compliment T. W. Parsons for 
his " Liues on a Bust of Dante," because he 
has become sick of praise confined to that 
piece, while the delicate beauty of scores 
of his other poems, and his noble rhymed 
translation of " Dante's Inferno," find few 
readers. Miss Lucy Larcom, when she pic- 
tured "Hannah Binding Shoes," did not 
dream that Hanuah was to draw away at- 
tention from her other heroines, and concen- 
trate it upon herself. Freneau's " Indian 
Burying- Ground" is the only piece of that 



poet which survives. "The Gray Forest Ea- 
gle" of A. B. Street has screamed away atten- 
tion from his " rippling of waters and wav- 
ing of trees" — from his hundreds of pages 
of descriptive verse which are almost pho- 
tographs of natural scenery. People quote 
the " Summer iu the Heart" and " A Life on 
the Ocean Wave" of Epes Sargent, and over- 
look many better specimens of his melody 
and his imagination. There are some poems 
which almost every body has read, which 
are commonly considered the only poems of 
the writers. Such are " The Star-spangled 
Banner," by F. S. Key ; " Woodman, Spare 
that Tree" (very insipid, by-the-way), by 
George P. Morris ; " A Hymn," by Joseph H. 
Clinch ; " The Baron's Last Banquet" and 
"Old Grimes is Dead," by A. G. Greene; 
" My Life is like the Summer Rose," by R. 
H. Wilde ; " Sweet Home," by John Howard 
Payne ; " The Christinas Hymn," by E. H. 
Sears ; "The Old Oaken Bucket," by Samuel 
Woodworth ; "Milton's Prayer of Patience," 
by Elizabeth Lloyd Howell; "The Relief 
of Lucknow," by Robert Lowell ; " The Old 
Sergeant," by Forceythe Wilson ; "The Vag- 
abonds," by J.T.Trowbridge ; and " Gnosis," 
by C. P. Cranch. There are other pieces, 
like the " Count Paul," and especially the 
"Theodora," of Mrs. Drinker (Edith May), 
which seem to be more deserving of success 
than some of those which have attained it. 
But little justice has been done to the po- 
etic and dramatic talent of George H. Boker. 
" The King's Bell," exquisite for the limpid 
flow of its verse and the sweetly melan- 
choly tone of its thought, together with 
other poems by Richard Henry Stoddard, 
have not received their due meed of praise. 
T. Buchanan Read wrote volumes of rich 
descriptive poetry, but the popularity of 
"Sheridan's Ride" is not sufficient to at- 
tract attention to them. 

In thus commenting on the instability 
and uncertainty of the public taste in re- 
spect to poets, we have unconsciously indi- 
cated quite an excellent body of American 
poetry, and we may proceed with the enu- 
meration. 

W. W. Story, famous as a sculptor, is also 
a poet, who throws into verse the same en- 
ergy of inspiration which is so obvious in 
his statues. Mrs. Frances S. Osgood had a 
singularly musical nature, and her poems 



396 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



sing of themselves. She did not appear to 
feel the fetters of rhyme ; she danced in 
them. Her poems, however, have the thin- 
ness of substance which often accompanies 
quickness of sensibility and activity of 
fancy. As it is, the reader rises from the 
perusal of her poems with a delicious mel- 
ody in his ears, a charming feeling in his 
heart, and with but few thoughts in his 
head. Mrs. M. J. Preston has a more robust 
intellect, greater intensity of feeling, and 
more force of imagination than Mrs. Osgood, 
though lacking her lovely grace and be- 
witching melodiousness ; but Mrs. Osgood 
could not have written a poem so deeply 
pathetic as " Keeping his Word." Henry 
Timrod and Paul H. Hayne are, with Mrs. 
Preston, the most distinguished poets of 
the South. Timrod's ode sung on the oc- 
casion of decorating the graves of the Con- 
federate dead is, in its simple grandeur, the 
noblest poem ever written by a Southern 
poet. Hayne exhibits in all his pieces a 
rich sensuousuess of nature, a seemingly ex- 
haustless fertility of fancy, an uncommon 
felicity of poetic description, and an easy 
command of the harmonies of verse. John 
G. Saxe owes his wide acceptance with the 
public not merely to the elasticity of his 
verse, the sparkle of his wit, and the famil- 
iarity of his topics, but to his power of dif- 
fusing the spirit of his own good humor. 
The unctuous satisfaction he feels in put- 
ting his mood of merriment into rhyme is 
communicated to his reader, so that, as it 
were, they laugh joyously together. Ed- 
mund Clarence Stedman, in addition to his 
merits as a critic of poetry, has written po- 
ems which stir the blood as well as quicken 
the imagination. Such, among others, are 
"John Brown of Osawatomie" aud "Kearney 
at Seven Pines." Perhaps the finest recent 
examples of exquisitely subtile imagination 
working under the impulse of profound sen- 
timent are to be found in the little vol- 
ume entitled " Poems by H. H." (Mrs. Helen 
Hunt). 

We have space only to mention the names 
of Jones Very, Celia Thaxter, Mrs. Lippin- 
cott (Grace Greenwood), H.H.BrownelhWill 
Carleton (author of Farm Ballads), Alice and 
Phcebe Cary, and Mrs. L. C. Monlton, though 
each would justify a detailed criticism. 

The limits of this essay do not admit the 



mention of every author who is worthy of 
notice. The reader must be referred for de- 
tails to the various volumes of Dr. R. W. 
Griswold, to the Cyclopedia of American Lit- 
erature, by E. A. and G. L. Duyckinck, to 
the useful Manual of American Literature, by 
Dr. John S. Hart, and the excellent Hand- 
Book of American Literature, by F. H. Un- 
derwood. Still, before concluding, it may 
be well to mention some names without 
which even so limited a view of American 
literature as the present would be incom- 
plete. And, first, honor is due to Henry T. 
Tuckermau, who for nearly forty years was 
the associate of American authors, and who 
labored, year after year, to diffuse a taste 
for literature by his articles in reviews and 
magazines. He belonged to the class of 
appreciative critics, and was never more 
pleased than when he exercised the resources 
of a cultivated mind to analyze, explain, and 
celebrate the merits of others. Richard 
Grant White, a critic of an austerer order, 
has for some time been engaged literally in 
a war of words. In the minutiae of English 
philology he has rarely met an antagonist 
he has not overthrown. In these encounters 
he has displayed wit, learning, logic, a per- 
fect command of his subject, an imperfect 
command of his temper. The positiveness 
of his statements, however, seems always to 
come from the certainty of his knowledge. 
In his admirable edition of Shakspeare, and 
in his Life and Genius of Shakspeare, he has 
exhibited his rare critical faculty at its best. 
Henry N. Hudson, also an editor, biographer, 
and critic of Shakspeare, has specially shown 
his masterly power of analysis in comment- 
ing on the characters of the dramatist. 
Henry Giles, in two or three volumes of bi- 
ography and criticism, has proved that clear 
perceptions, nice distinctions, and sound 
sense can be united with a rush of eloquence 
which seems too rapid for the pausing doubt 
of discriminating judgment. S. A. Allibone's 
Dictionary of Authors, with its 46,000 names, 
is one of those prodigies of labor which ex- 
cite not only admiration, but astonishment. 
George P. Marsh, one of the most widely ac- 
complished of American scholars, is princi- 
pally known as the author of Lectures on the 
English Language and of The English Language 
and Early English Literature, both critical 
works of a high class. The greatest com- 



THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE. 



397 



parative philologist the country has pro- 
duced, William D. Whitney, has, like Max 
Miiller, in Englaud, popularized some of the 
results of his investigation in an admirable 
volume on Language, and the Study of Lan- 
guage. 

The theological literature of the United 
States covers so wide a field that it would 
he wild to attempt to characterize here even 
its eminent representatives. We can give 
only a few names. Henry Ward Beecher, 
the most widely renowned pulpit and plat- 
form orator of the country, is more remark- 
able for the general largeness and opulence 
of his nature than for the possession of any 
exceptional power of mind or extent of ac- 
quisition. As a theological scholar, or, in- 
deed, as a trained and accurate writer, no- 
body would think of comparing him with 
Francis Wayland, or Leonard Bacon, or Ed- 
wards A. Park, or Frederick H. Hedge. In 
depth of spiritual insight, though not in 
depth of spiritual emotion, he is inferior to 
Horace Bushnell, Cyrus A. Bartol, and many 
other American divines. He feels spiritual 
facts intensely ; he beholds them with wa- 
vering vision. But his distinction is that 
he is a formidable, almost irresistible, moral 
force. His influence comes from the con- 
joint and harmonious action of his whole 
blood and brain and will and soul, and his 
magnetism being thus both physical and 
mental, he communicates his individuality 
in the act of radiating his thoughts, and 
thus Beecherizes his readers as he Beecherizes 
his audiences. He overpowers where he 
fails to convince. The reader, but especial- 
ly the listener, is brought into direct con- 
tact or collision not only with a thinker 
and a stirrer up of the emotions, but with 
a strong, resolute, intrepid man. As Emer- 
son would say, he could mob a mob, and 
compel it to submit. This continual sense 
of conscious power impels him into many 
imprudences and indiscretions, and stamps 
on what he says, and what he writes, and 
what he does, a character of haste and ex- 
temporaneousness. No man could throw off 
such an amount of intellectual work as he 
performs, who thought comprehensively or 
who thought deeply ; for the comprehensive 
thinker hesitates, the deep thinker doubts ; 
but hesitation and doubt are foreign to Mr. 
Beecher's intellectual constitution, and only 



intrude into his consciousness in those occa- 
sional reactions caused by the moral fatigue 
resulting now and then from his hurried, 
headlong intellectual movement. Observa- 
tion, sense, wit, humor, fancy, sentiment, 
moral perception, moral might, are all in- 
cluded and fused in the large individuali- 
ty whose mode of action we have ventured 
to sketch. 

There are some books which it is diffi- 
cult to class. Thus, Richard H. Dana, Jun., 
published some thirty years ago a volume 
called Two Years Before the Mast, which be- 
came instantly popular, is popular now, 
and promises to be popular for many years 
to come. In reading it any body can see 
that it is more than an ordinary record of a 
voyage, for there runs through the simple 
and lucid narrative an element of beauty 
and power which gives it the artistic charm 
of romance. Again, Six Months in Italy, by 
George S. Hillard, and Notes of Travel and 
Study in Italy, by Charles E. Norton, would 
be superficially classed among books of 
travel, but they are essentially works of lit- 
erature, and their chief worth consists in 
descriptions of natural scenery, in pointed 
reflection, in delicate criticism of works of 
art. The volume entitled White Hills, by 
Thomas Starr King, apparently intended 
merely to describe the mountain region of 
New Hampshire, is all aglow with a glad 
inspiration drawn from the ardent soul and 
teeming mind of the writer. Charles T. 
Brooks would generally be classed as a trans- 
lator, but being a poet, he has so translated 
the novels of Richter that he has domesti- 
cated them in our language. Such trans- 
lations are greater efforts of intelligence 
and imagination than many original works. 
Horace Mann's reports as secretary of the 
Massachusetts Board of Education rank with 
legislative documents, yet they are really 
eloquent treatises, full of matter, but of mat- 
ter burning with passion and blazing with 
imagery. Suhstance and Shadow, by Henry 
James, might be classed either with theo- 
logical or metaphysical works, were it not 
that the writer, while treating on the deep- 
est questions which engage the attention 
of theologians and metaphysicians, stretch- 
es both theologians and metaphysicians on 
the rack of his pitiless analysis, and showers 
upon them all the boundless stores of his 



398 



A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



ridicule. Miss Mary A. Dodge (Gail Hamil- 
ton) might be styled an essayist, but that 
would be but a vague term to denote a writ- 
er who takes up all classes of subjects, is 
tart, tender, shrewish, pathetic, monitory, 
objurgatory, tolerant, prejudiced, didactic, 
aud dramatic by turns, but always writing 
with so much point, vigor, and freshness 
that we can only classify her amoug "reada- 
ble" authors. Margaret Fuller Ossoli, schol- 
ar, critic, teacher, translator, metaphysician, 
philanthropist, revolutionist, a pythoness in 
a transcendental coterie, a nurse in a sol- 
diers' hospital, a martyr heroine on board a 
wrecked ship — we can only say of her that 
she was a woman. There is a delightful 
book entitled Yesterdays with Authors, by 
James T. Fields — a combination of gossip, 
biography, and criticism, but refusing to be 
ranked with either, and depending for its 
interest on the life-like pictures it presents 
of such men as Hawthorne, Dickens, aud 
Thackeray in their hours of familiar talk 
and correspondence. There is also one work 
of such pretension that it should not be 
omitted here, namely, Outlines of Cosmic Phi- 
losophy, based on the Doctrine of Evolution, by 
John Fiske. It is mainly a lucid exposition 
of the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, with 
the addition of original and critical matter. 
The breadth and strength of understanding, 
the fullness of information, the command 
of expression, in this book are worthy of all 
commendation. The curious thing in it is 
that the author thinks that a new religion 
is to be established on the co-ordination of 
the sciences, and of this religion, whose God 
is the "Unknowable," he is a pious believer. 
In conclusion, we can only allude to the 



intellectual force, the various talents and 
accomplishments, employed in the leading 
newspapers of the country. During the past 
thirty years these journals have swarmed 
with all kinds of anonymous ability. Though 
the articles appeared to die with the day or 
week on which they were printed, they re- 
ally passed, for good or evil, into the gener- 
al mind as vital influences, shaping public 
opinion and forming public taste. It would 
be difficult, for example, to estimate the be- 
neficent action on our literature of such a 
critic and scholar as George Ripley, who for 
many years directed the literary department 
of a widely circulated newspaper. The 
range of his learning was equal to every de- 
mand upon its resources ; the candor of his 
judgment answered to the comprehensive- 
ness of his taste ; the catholicity of his liter- 
ary sympathies led him to encourage every 
kind of literary talent on its first appear- 
ance ; and he was pure from the stain of 
that meanest form of egotism which grudges 
the recognition of merit in others, as if such 
a recognition was a diminution of its own 
importance. The great development, dur- 
ing a comparatively recent period, of the 
magazine literature of the country has had 
an important effect in stimulating and bring- 
ing forward new writers, some of whom 
promise to more than fill the places which 
their elders will soon leave vacant. It 
would be presumptuous to anticipate the 
verdict of the next generation as to which 
of these will fulfill the expectations raised 
by their early efforts. That pleasant duty 
must be left to the fortunate person who 
shall note the Centennial Progress of Ameri- 
can Literature in 1976. 



XIII. 

PROGRESS OF THE FINE ARTS. 




PAUL BKVEHB. — [1735-1818.] 

THE growth of the arts of design in this 
country has been of necessity much 
slower than the national development in 
other directions. The early colonists had 
neither time nor inclination for the culture 
of art. They distrusted and restrained the 
imaginative faculty, which is the soul of 
art, and applied all their energies to the 
great practical tasks which confronted them 
on their arrival on the shores of the New 
World. They had the vast wilderness to 
subdue, houses to build for themselves and 
their children, to found commonwealths on 
the broad basis of liberty and justice, and 
for many generations were compelled to 
maintain fierce warfare with crafty and cru- 
el foes allied with the civilized enemies of 
the religious freedom which they had fled 
hither to establish. If the early New En- 
gland colonists gave any thought to art 
they probably regarded it as one of the 
forms of luxurious vanity and license be- 
longing to a state of society which they 



held in abhorrence, and from which they 
were resolved to keep their land of refuge 
free. Allowance must also be made for the 
force of circumstances. The struggle for 
mere subsistence was too severe for the in- 
dulgence of the imagination. The only 
graces known to the early colonists were 
the austere virtues of their rigid theology. 
To adorn the home or the person was in 
their eyes a sinful waste of time, which 
could be well employed only in the practi- 
cal duties of the present life and in pre- 
paring for the next. The influence of this 
stern training was of long duration ; it still 
exists, indeed, in the prejudice to be found 
in many communities against the presence 
of pictures or sculpture in houses of wor- 
ship, although this may be partially as- 
cribed to the old Puritan revolt against 
Romish practices. 

With the physical development of the 
country, and the consequent freedom from 
the harassing cares which had kept the 
thoughts of the early colonists on the arts 
of necessity, one form of luxury after an- 
other crept in upon the homely life of our 
ancestors. Pictures began to find their way 
here from the Old World, and artists began 
to visit the colonies. It is probable that 
they met with many discouragements and 
but scanty patronage, for few authentic 
traces have been preserved of those early 
pioneers of art. Cotton Mather, in his Mag- 
nolia, refers to a " limner," but he gives us 
no name. One of the first of whom we have 
other than vague traditions was a native of 
Scotland, John Watson by name, who came 
to the colonies in 1715, and established him- 
self as a portrait painter at Perth Amboy, 
then a flourishing commercial rival of New 
York, In a building adjoining his dwell- 
ing-house he established the first picture- 
gallery in America. The collection was 
probably of little value. Watson, who com- 
bined the art of portrait painting with the 
business of a money-lender, amassed a con- 
siderable fortune. He never married, and 
dying in 1768, at the age of eighty-three, 



400 



PROGRESS OF THE FINE AETS. 




: 

JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY. — [1737-1815.] 

left his wealth and his pictures to a neph- 
ew. Taking sides with the loyalists in 1776, 
the nephew was compelled to flee the coun- 
try. The deserted picture-gallery, left to 
the mercies of the undisciplined militia, 
was broken up, and the collection of paint- 
ings was so effectually scattered that all 
trace of them was lost. None of the por- 
traits executed by Watson are known to 
be in existence, and he is remembered only 
as an obscure pioneer in the culture and 
development of a taste for the fine arts in 
this country. 

To John Smybert, also a Scotchman, Amer- 
ican art is more largely indebted. He came 
to this country in 1728 with Dean Berkeley, 
afterward Bishop of Cloyne, whose fellow- 
traveler he had been in Italy. The failure 
of the dean's grand scheme for the estab- 
lishment of a "universal college of science 
and arts for the instruction of heathen chil- 
dren in Christian duties and civil knowl- 
edge" left Smybert to the free exercise of 
his profession. Id early youth he had served 
his time, ways Horace Walpole, ". with a com- 
mon house painter ; but eager to handle a 
pencil in a more elevated style, he came to 
London, where, however, for a subsistence 
In- was compelled to content himself at first 
with working for coach painters. It was a 
little rise to be employed in copying for 



dealers, and from thence he obtained ad- 
mittance into the Academy. His efforts and 
ardor at last carried him to Italy, where he 
spent three years in copying Raphael, Titian, 
Vandyck, and Rubens, and improved enough 
to meet with much business at his return." 
Thus accomplished, Smybert was well fitted 
for a career in the New World, which pre- 
sented no rival in culture and experience. 
His talents appear to have been in great de- 
mand, and they were certainly used to good 
purpose. To his pencil we owe many excel- 
lent portraits of eminent divines and magis- 
trates of his time, and the only authentic 
portrait of Jonathan Edwards. His picture 
of the Berkeley household, now in the Yale 
College Gallery, is said to have been the first 
containing more than one figure ever paint- 
ed in this country. He may be said to have 
been the first teacher of art in America, as 
it was from his copy of a painting by Van- 
dyck that Allston, Copley, and Trumbull re- 
ceived their earliest inspiration and their 
first impressions of color and drawing. 

It was long before art received popular 
encouragement and support in this coun- 
try. True, Benjamin Franklin, in a letter 
to Charles Wilson Peale, dated London, 
July 4, 1771, prophesied the future prosper- 
ity of art among his countrymen. "The 
arts," he says, " have always traveled west- 
ward ; and there is no doubt of their flour- 
ishing hereafter on our side of the Atlantic, 
as the number of wealthy inhabitants shall 
increase who may be able and willing suit- 
ably to reward them, since, from several in- 
stances, it appears that our people are not 
deficient in genius." But Trumbull, who 
spoke from experience, bluntly told a young 
aspirant for fame that he " had better learn 
to make shoes or dig potatoes than become 
a painter in this country." Year by year, 
however, partly through the influence of art 
associations, and partly through the influx 
of the works of foreign artists, the love of 
art became diffused among our people, and 
it is many years since American painters 
and sculptors could justly complain of the 
want of popular .appreciation. 

One cause of the slow growth of art sen- 
timent and art knowledge among Americans 
was the absence, even in the larger cities, of 
public and private galleries of paintings like 
those to which the people of every European 



PUBLIC AET GALLERIES. 



401 




BENJAMIN WEST. — [1738-1320.] 

city have constant access, and where they 
may become familiar with the works of the 
great masters of almost every age and coun- 
try. Of late years these opportunities have 
notably increased among us. Wealthy cit- 
izens of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, 
Washington, Cincinnati, and other cities 
have accumulated extensive and valuable 
private galleries of the best works of native 
and foreign artists, and have evinced com- 
mendable liberality in opening their doors 
to the public. There are also fine galleries 
of paintings and statuary belougiug to so- 
cieties, like the Boston Athenaeum and our 
own Historical Society ; but to most of 
these the general public can not claim ad- 
mission, and their usefulness as a moans of 
art culture is, therefore, comparatively re- 
stricted. There should be iu every large 
city a public gallery of art, as in Paris, Ber- 
lin, Munich, London, Dresden, Florence, and 
other European cities, to which, on certain 
days of the week, access should be free to 
all. The influence of such institutions would 
be immense. There is many a working-man 
in Paris who knows more about pictures and 
statues than the majority of cultivated peo- 
ple in this country. He visits freely the 
magnificent galleries of the Louvre, hears 
artists and connoisseurs converse, and if he 
is a man of ordinary intelligence and per- 
ception, he acquires a knowledge of pictures 
and artists which can not be attained in a 
26 



country where such opportunities are rare, 
or only to be enjoyed either by payiug for 
them or by the favor of some private col- 
lector. True, the want of public art gal- 
leries has been in a measure supplied, in 
most of our large cities, by the collections 
of art dealers like Schaus and Goupil, who 
of late years have imported many of the 
finest specimens of the works of foreign 
artists, and who admit the public to their 
exhibition rooms without fee. But this 
privilege is, for the most part, confined to 
the educated and the wealthy. Rarely is 
a working-man or working-woman seen in 
these rooms, although no respectable and 
well-behaved person Avoidd be denied ad- 
mission. Enter the galleries of Paris, of 
Munich, or Dresden, on a holiday, and you 
will find hundreds of people belonging to 
the working classes, men, women, and chil- 
dren, feasting their eyes on the treasures of 
art, and filling their minds with love for the 
beautiful. The refining influence of such an 
education can not be overvalued. It may 
not be quite as useful as the practical in- 
struction of our common schools ; but while 
we can not subscribe to Ruskiu's opinion 
that it is more important that a child 
should learn to draw than that he should 
learn to write, there can be no question as 
to the ennobling and refining influence of 
art upon personal character and upon the 
community. The lack of this culture among 




GILBERT STUART. — [1754-1828.] 



402 



PROGRESS OF THE FINE ARTS. 



our people only a few years ago was man- 
ifested by the commotion which Powers's 
"Greek Slave" made on its arrival in this 
country. Many persons questioned the pro- 
priety of exhibiting a nude statue. A dele- 
gation of distinguished clergymen was sent 
to view it, when it was at Cincinnati, for 
the purpose of deciding whether it should 
be " countenanced by religious people." 
Not many years ago a well-educated coun- 
try lady, visiting Boston for the first time 
in her life, was shocked to find a pretty and 
modest-looking young woman seated at the 
ticket table in the statue gallery of the Athe- 
naeum. The young woman was engaged in 
sewing-work. " She ought to employ her 
time in making aprons for these horrid, 
shameful statues," remarked the indignant 
visitor, as she left the room. Prejudices 
like these, the fruit of ignorance, are hap- 
pily dying out, and few traces of them will 
be found in the next generation. 

The American Art Union, founded in 1839, 
in imitation of the French Society des Amis 
des A rts, exerted an important influence upon 
American art culture. For upward of ten 
years it distributed annually from five hun- 
dred to more than a thousand works of art. 
Its yearly subscriptions reached the sum of 
one hundred thousand dollars. It issued a 
series of fine engravings from the works of 
American artists, and for several years pub- 
lished a bulletin embracing a complete rec- 
ord of the progress of art in this country, to- 
gether with much valuable and interesting 
information regarding the arts and artists 
of Europe. Through the agency of its com- 
missions several American artists, who have 
since attained high rank in their profession, 
were first brought to public notice. The 
institution was broken up about ton years 
after its organization on account of the vio- 
lation, by its method of distributing prizes, 
of the State laws against lotteries. But 
during the period of its existence it accom- 
plished much toward awakening a love of 
art throughout the country, and it deserves 
to be gratefully remembered for its services 
in this direction. 

In one respect, however, the Art Union 
was the indirect means of temporary harm. 
Through its activity America was revealed 
to the proprietors of the great picture manu- 
factories of Italy and Belgium as a new and 



promising field for the sale of their wretch- 
ed copies and imitations. Thousands of 
these vile productions were palmed off upon 
innocent persons in this country as genuine 
works by old or modern masters of note. 
The writer was once present at an auction 
sale of such a collection in a flourishing city 
in the western part of this State. There was 
great excitement over it. Here were " old 
masters" by the dozen, their genuineness at- 
tested by printed labels on the back of the 
frames giving names and dates, while the 
catalogue, filled with glowing praises of the 
artists and their works, made no mention 
of copies. The pictures were marvelously 
cheap. A Madonna by Raphael sold for 
thirty dollars, frame and all; a large pic- 
ture by Rubens for about the same price ; 
and landscapes by Claude, Ruysdael, and 
others brought from ten to twenty dollars 
each, according to the expensiveness of the 
frames. This was about twenty-five years 
ago. Thanks to the general advance of 
culture and knowledge, there is now prob- 
ably hardly a village, and certainly not a 
city, in the country where such an imposi- 
tion could be attempted without detection. 
Most of the "old masters" purchased at these 
sales have long since found their appropri- 
ate resting-place in the lumber-room. 

The National Academy of Design, in this 
city, has unquestionably exerted a most im- 
portant influence on the culture of art in 
America, and in the diffusion of the knowl- 
edge and love of art among the people. The 
present organization was preceded by an 
association of artists formed in 1801 under 
the name of the New York Academy of Fine 
Arts. Seven years later it received the act 
of incorporation, under the name of the 
American Academy of Fine Arts, and Chan- 
cellor Livingston was chosen president ; 
Colonel John Trumbull, vice-president ; De 
Witt Clinton, David Hosack, John R. Mur- 
ray, William Cutting, and Charles Wilkes, 
directors. Through the instrumentality of 
the American minister at Paris, the Emper- 
or Napoleon presented to the institution 
many valuable busts, antique statues, and 
rare prints. There was still, however, so 
little general support afforded by the com- 
munity, and picture buyers were so few, that 
the enterprise languished from the first, and 
it was saved from total dissolution only by 



THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF DESIGN. 



403 



the temporary accession of Vanderlyn's cel- 
ebrated " Ariadne," afterward so admirably 
engraved by Durand, and certain pictures 
of West, in 1816. These important addi- 
tions to its collection enabled the institu- 
tion for a time to tide over the danger which 
threatened its existence. A school of in- 
struction, with models and art lectures, was 
also organized, in the hope of reviving pop- 
ular interest in the Academy, but want of 
means to carry out the plan on a broad and 
liberal foundation interfered with the work- 
ing of the project ; and a fire, which destroy- 
ed a great part of its models and drawings, 
in 1828, gave the coup de grace to an insti- 
tution which had been dying by slow de- 
grees. 

The American Academy of Fine Arts hav- 
ing given up the ghost, another institution 
was formed to take its place and carry on 
the work it had begun — the National Acad- 
emy of Design, of which the first president 
was Professor Morse, whose invention of the 
electric telegraph, some years later, cast his 
artistic career wholly in the shade. Found- 
ed on a broader basis than its predecessor, 
and meeting more fully the wishes and aims 
of the artists, the new institution speedily 
acquired strength and popularity, and it is 
to-day the most important and most influen- 
tial art society in the United States. The 
most eminent painters and sculptors of 
America are enrolled among its members. 
Its management has frequently subjected 
the Academy to sharp animadversion, some- 
times not undeserved, from those who deem- 
ed it too conservative, not to say illiberal, 
for the progressive tendency of the age ; 
but none can be so unjust as to deny that 
its general course has tended to the ele- 
vation of American art and the popular dif- 
fusion of art culture. Nor should fauli be 
too rashly found with its acknowledged 
conservatism. The best and most enduring 
reforms are those which come slowly, in 
obedience to the demands of long expe- 
rience and mature consideration, while 
nothing can be worse, in a society as well 
as in the state, than capricious and hasty 
changes, which frequently introduce abuses 
more objectionable than the old. 

For more than a third of a century the 
National Academy, to use the words of Bry- 
ant's address on laying the corner-stone of 



the Academy building, "had a nomadic ex- 
istence, pitching its tent now here, now 
there, as convenience might dictate, but 
never possessing a permanent seat." At 
length the munificence of art-loving citizens 
of New York enabled the society to erect a 
building well suited to its purposes and 
worthy of the great city in which it stands. 
The corner-stone was laid October 19, 1863, 
and the first exhibition was held in the com- 
pleted building in the spring of 1865. The 
Academy building, on the corner of Twenty- 
third Street and Fourth Avenue, is a hand- 
some structure in the style of the celebrated 
Doge's palace at Venice. It is built of mar- 
ble, banded with graywacke, with simple 




COLONEL JOIIN TRUMBULL. — [1756-1843.] 

and appropriate decorations. The cost of 
the ground and building was about two 
hundred thousand dollars, a large part of 
which was contributed by citizens of New 
York. There are six exhibition galleries, in- 
cluding the corridor, which for the present 
afford all the space required for the Acad- 
emy aud water-color exhibitions ; but an 
enlargement will be necessary in the near 
future to meet the increasing demands for 
room. 

Philadelphia was not far behind New 
York in establishing an Academy of Art. 
In December, 1805, a meeting of seveuty 
gentlemen of that city, most of them mem- 
bers of the bar, was held in Independence 
Hall for the purpose of considering the proj- 
ect. Their deliberations resulted in the 



404 



PROGRESS OF THE FINE ARTS. 




AXEXANDER ANDERSON. — [1TT5-1S70.] 

signing of articles of agreement, the origi- 
nal of which is still preserved, providing for 
the creation of an Art Academy, which was 
pledged " to promote the cultivation of the 
Fine Arts in the United States of America, 
by introducing correct and elegant copies 
from works of the first masters in Sculpture 
and Painting." George Clymer, a signer of 
the Declaration of Independence, was elect- 
ed first president of the association ; of the 
twelve directors only two were professional 
artists — William Rush and Charles Wilson 
Peale. Benjamin West, as the most distin- 
guished son of Pennsylvania in the ranks 
of art, was elected an honorary member of 
the Academy. He was then under a cloud 
in his adopted country. His royal patron 
had become insane, and the Prince Regent 
had withdrawn the commission for the dec- 
oration of Windsor Chapel with a series of 
large pictures on the progress of Revealed 
Religion. He was sixty-seven years old, 
and this recognition from his native State, 
coming at a time when he was smarting un- 
der a sharp disappointment, deeply touched 
the venerable painter's heart. " Be assured, 
gentlemen," he wrote in reply, "that that 
election I shall ever retain as an honor from 
a relative." Robert Fulton, artist and in- 
ventor, and Bushrod Washington were the 
next honorary members after West. 

Unlike its New York rival, the Philadel- 
phia Academy made haste to provide for 
itself a permanent home. The society's 



charter, procured in the spring of 1806, 
makes mention of a building then near 
completion. It Avas of simple design and 
well proportioned. Its main feature was 
the " Rotunda" — a handsome circular room 
with a domed ceiling. The first exhibition 
was held in March, 1806. The collection of 
works of art contained over fifty casts of 
antique statues from the Louvre, two Shaks- 
pearean paintings by West, and a few oth- 
er pictures by European artists. The ladies 
of Philadelphia appear to have been pecul- 
iarly sensitive on the subject of nude stat- 
uary, and one day in the week the Academy 
was thrown open for their exclusive benefit. 
Gradually the Academy acquired a large 
and valuable collection of paintings and 
casts, many of them bequests from wealthy 
citizens. In 1811, in conjunction with the 
Society of Artists, it gave its first annual 
exhibition. The second, in 1812, was marked 
by the presence of several important works 
by American artists, evincing the progress 
made by native talent. In 1816 the Acad- 
emy collection was enriched with a noble 
painting by Allston, "The dead Man revived 
by touching the Relics of Elisha," and also 
by Leslie's " Clifford" — a fine composition, 
taken from the scene in Henry VI. where 
Clifford murders the young Plantagenet, 
Rutland. 

The collection gradually increased in val- 
ue by gifts and judicious purchases, and at 
the time of the destruction of the building 
by fire, in 1845, it was without a rival in 
America. A valuable Murillo, a represen- 
tation of the " Carita Romana," or Roman 
Daughter, bought in Spain from the collec- 
tion of Joseph Bonaparte, perished in the 
flames, with many other paintings, casts, 
and statues in marble. The Academy soon 
recovered from this disaster. It now pos- 
sesses a valuable gallery of statuary, com- 
prising modern works in marble and casts 
from the antique, a permanent gallery of 
paintings, consisting of about a hundred 
and fifty works by native and foreign art- 
ists, and an excellent library. Its new 
building, the opening of which will be one 
of the most interesting features of the Cen- 
tennial celebration, is a noble structure, ad- 
mirably suited to the purposes for which it 
is designed. 

It is only within a recent period that the 



THE WATER-COLOR SOCIETY. 



405 



beautiful art of painting in water -color, 
long since carried to perfection in England, 
became popular in this country. It had 
many stubborn prejudices to contend with. 
Works in water-color looked slight and un- 
substantial compared with those in oil, and 
a taste for them had to be created and fos- 
tered. In the Academy exhibitions a cor- 
ner was usually set apart for them, but they 
were generally few in number and of trifling 
value. The first organized movement in the 
direction of a water -color society in this 
country was made in 1850, when a class was 
started in New York for study from life, the 
sketches being made in water-color. The 
members were for the most part well-known 
designers or engravers. They held their 
meetings every fortnight. In December, 
1850, this " class" adopted a constitution, 
and thus formed the first Society of Paint- 
ers in Water-Colors in the United States. 
There are* records of meetings held from 
time to time until the opening of the Crys- 
tal Palace in this city in 1853. Then each 
member of the society contributed a speci- 
men of his work. The collection was hung 
by itself on a screen, and was specified in 
the catalogue of the exhibition as "Water- 
color Paintings by Members of the New 
York Water- color Society." This was a 
dying effort. Nothing was ever heard of 
the society again. 



» 




REMBRANDT PEAI.E. — [1778-1860.] 




WASHINGTON ALI.STON. — [1779-1843.] 

With the exception of one or two foreign 
collections, nothing more was seen of water- 
color paintings in this country until the 
autumn of 1866, when the Artists' Fund So- 
ciety, in its annual exhibition held in the 
National Academy of Design, made a feat- 
ure of this branch of art. Mainly through 
the efforts of Mr. John M. Falconer, an en- 
thusiast in water -colors, the society was 
able to fill the East Gallery and part of the 
corridor with a fine collection of works by 
native and foreign artists. Encouraged by 
the pleasure manifested by the art-loving 
public, which then for the first time had the 
opportunity to judge of the real capabilities 
of water-color painting, a number of artists 
at once started a project for the organiza- 
tion of a water-color society which might 
popularize this beautiful art on this side of 
the Atlantic. A call signed by Samuel Col- 
man, William Hart, Gilbert Burling, and 
William Craig was sent out to all the pro- 
fessional and amateur artists who were 
known to be interested in the movement. 
The result was the organization, in Decem- 
ber, 1866, of the present flourishing institu- 
tion of "The American Society of Painters 
in Water-Colors." 

The first exhibition of the new society 
was held in the galleries of the National 
Academy of Design, under Academy manage- 
ment, in connection with the fall and win- 
ter exhibition of oil-paintings. It was in 
many respects a successful experiment. The 
collection contained nearly three hundred 



406 



PROGRESS OF THE FINE ARTS. 



works, among -which were many crude and 
insipid compositions side by side with works 
of great value and still greater promise. 
The public was pleased with the novelty; 
the water-color galleries were crowded day 
and evening with admiring spectators. But 
the sales were few. The public admired, 
but did not buy. But the water-colorists 
were not discouraged. They clung to their 
work, firm in the faith that as knowledge 
ripened, their reward would come. Each 
year witnessed a marked improvement in 
their exhibition, both in the number and 
quality of the works exposed to view. The 
exhibition of 1874 filled all the Academy 
galleries except one, which is considered un- 
favorable to the proper display of water- 
colors, and the hanging committee was 
obliged, for want of room and other reasons, 
to return almost as many pictures as were 
exhibited in 1867. The popular prejudice 
against water-colors gave way to a just ap- 
preciation. During the first four exhibi- 
tions the number of sales could almost be 
counted upon one's fingers ; but during the 
six weeks of the exhibition of 1874 the sales 
of water-colors on the walls amounted to 
$20,000, a success unprecedented in this coun- 
try. Now that it pays to paint in water- 
colors, the permanent success of the society 
depends only upon the members and the ex- 
ercise of good judgment in the conduct of 
its affairs. Its exhibitions, although held 
in the Academy building, are no longer un- 
der the management of the National Acad- 
emy, nor in connection with its exhibitions. 
The water-color society has an active mem- 
bership of fifty-four artists. Its financial 
affairs are in a flourishing condition, and 
there is every reason to predict for it a brill- 
iant future. Plans have already been per- 
fected which will secure for the society a 
creditable display at the Centennial Exhi- 
bition at Philadelphia, when the country 
will have an opportunity to see what our 
artists have been able to do toward rivaling 
those of England in this important branch 
of painting. 

Turning from these societies, the most im- 
portant art associations in the United States, 
to special departments of art, we come first 
to the consideration of portraiture, which 
was pursued with more success than any 
other branch before and immediately after 



the Revolution. Benjamin West, whose ca- 
reer, like that of John Singleton Copley, be- 
longs mainly to England, began portrait 
painting in 1753, and had he not forsaken 
it for historical and religious painting, his 
fame would probably have been more endur- 
ing. Of the immense number of paintings 
executed by him during his long career, es- 
timated at upward of three thousand, only 
one — " The Death of Wolfe" — rises appre- 
ciably above the dead level of Academical 
mediocrity. His mind, hopelessly devoid 
of imagination, constantly aspired to the 
treatment of themes which might well ap- 
pall the most daring genius — such, for ex- 
ample, as "Moses receiving the Law on 
Mount Sinai," "The Opening of the Seventh 
Seal in the Revelations," " The Mighty An- 
gel with one Foot on the Sea and the other 
on the Earth," etc. A pretty story is told 
of his first attempts at painting. Inspired 
at the age of nine by the sight of some en- 
gravings and the gift of a paint-box, he used 
to play truant from school, " and as soon as 
he got out of sight of his father and mother, 
he would steal up to his garret, and there 
pass the hours in a world of his own. At 
last, after he had been absent from school 
some days, the master called at his father's 
house to inquire what had become of him. 
This led to the discovery of his secret occu- 
pation. His mother, proceeding to the gar- 
ret, found the truant ; but so much was she 
astonished and delighted by the creations 
of his pencil, which also met her view when 
she entered the apartment, that, instead of 
rebuking him, she could only take him in 
her arms and kiss him with transports of 
affection." Doubtless many other soft- 
hearted mothers have thus greeted what 
they fondly imagined to be the dawning of 
genius in their offspring, but with conse- 
quences less appalling. The young artist 
went early to Rome, where his appearance, 
coming from the far Western world, excited 
curious interest and attention. Crowds fol- 
lowed him to observe the impressions cre- 
ated by the marvels he encountered. On 
the completion of his studies, which he pur- 
sued with assiduity, he went to England, 
there soon afterward married, and there re- 
mained until his death, at the age of seven- 
ty-nine. But a very small number of his 
works are owned in this country. His 



WEST AND COPLEY. 



407 



" Christ healing the Sick," presented hy the 
artist to the Pennsylvania Hospital, is still 
in the possession of that institution. It was 
once greatly admired. The Philadelphia 
Academy of Fine Arts owns his "Death on 
the Pale Horse ;" his "Christ Rejected" and 
his "Cupid" are also owned in that city. 
His " Lear" may be seen in the gallery of 
the Boston Athenaeum. Two of his pic- 
tures, illustrating scenes from the Iliad, be- 
long to the collection of the New York His- 
torical Society. It must be remembered to 
his honor that he was the first historical 
painter to break through the absurd Aca- 
demical traditions which required modern 
subjects to be painted in the so-called clas- 
sic style. When his " Death of Wolfe" was 
exhibited at the Royal Academy of Loudon, 
the adherents of the old style " complained 
of the barbarism of boots, buttons, and blun- 
derbusses, and cried out for naked warriors 
with bows, bucklers, and battering-rams." 
Reynolds and the Archbishop of York re- 
monstrated with West against his daring 
innovation. The artist calmly replied that 
" the event to be commemorated happened 
in the year 1758, in a region of the world 
unknown to the Greeks and Romans, and at 
a period when no warrior who wore classic 
costume existed. The same rule which gave 
law to the historian should govern the paint- 
er." Reynolds was at length compelled to 
acknowledge the justice of the popular ver- 
dict in favor of the new style, and to declare 
that "West has conquered. I foresee that 
this picture will not only become one of 
the most popular, but will occasion a revo- 
lution in art." West was a sensible, kind- 
ly man, of pure life and lofty aims. His 
ambition, unhappily, was far beyond his ca- 
pacity as an artist, and his fame has stead- 
ily declined since his death. His highest 
distinction as an artist was his elevation to 
the presidency of the Royal Academy. 

Copley's American career closed with the 
beginning of the Revolution. He was born 
in Boston on the 3d of July, 1737, and died 
in London on the 25th of September, 1815. 
He was the only native painter of real 
genius and culture of whom the New World 
could boast prior to the Declaration of In- 
dependence ; and the skill and assiduity 
with which he pursued his profession are 
attested by the number of portraits from 




THOMAS SULLY. — [1783-1872.] 

his pencil which still exist in the possession 
of old families in New England, and occa- 
sionally in the Southern States. It has 
been said that the possession of one of these 
ancestral portraits is an American's best 
title of nobility. Chiefly celebrated for his 
portraits, Copley also attempted historical 
compositions, a department of art in which 
he received but little encouragement, al- 
though the " Death of Chatham," and " The 
Death of Major Pierson," the latter being 
regarded as his greatest work, evinced con- 
siderable power of composition and color. 

Dunlap, in his scrappy but entertaining 
history of the arts of design in America, 
gives the names of a large number of por- 
trait painters, native and foreign, who flour- 
ished during colonial and Revolutionary 
times in this country. Most of them have 
been long forgotten, and but few merit at- 
tention at the present day. There was Wol- 
laston, who painted several portraits in Phil- 
adelphia in 1758, and afterward in Maryland. 
His portrait of Mrs. Washington was en- 
graved for Sparks's biography of our first 
President. Judge Hopkinson paid him a 
tribute in commonplace verse in the Ameri- 
can Magazine for September, 1758. In many 
of the older dwellings in Maryland may be 
found portraits from the pencil of Hesselius, 
an English painter of respectable capacity, 
settled in Annapolis in 1763. Cosmo Alex- 
ander, who came to this country in 1770 and 



408 



PEOGRESS OF THE FINE ARTS. 



remained a year, was Stuart's first instructor 
in art. His best-known work is a portrait 
of the Hon. John Ross, a prominent member 
of the Philadelphia bar. Blackburn, an En- 
glishman, a contemporary of Smybert, paint- 
ed several excellent portraits during a brief 
visit to this country, which are still held in 
high esteem. The name of Robert E. Pine 
is chiefly remembered for his portrait of 
Washington. This artist brought to Amer- 
ica the earliest cast of the Venus de' Medici, 
" which was privately exhibited to the se- 
lect few — the manners and morals of the 
Quaker City forbidding its exposure to the 







iiiiitiiiiiii 
iiiiiiiiii 

FBOITE8SOB MORSE. — [1T91-1S72.] 

common eye." Pine sympathized with the 
American cause, and projected a grand se- 
ries of historical paintings to illustrate the 
events of the Revolutionary war. His plan 
also comprehended the portraits of leading 
generals and statesmen. Invited to Mount 
Vernon in 1785, he passed three weeks at 
that place, and produced a portrait of Wash- 
ington which is believed by many to be a 
more correct and characteristic likeness of 
the man than the later and better-known 
portrait by Stuart. 

Passing over several names on which it 
would be pleasant to dwell if space permit- 



ted, we come to Charles Wilson Peale, the 
first painter of Washington. He was born 
in Chestertown, Maryland, in 1741. Deter- 
mining at an early age on the profession of 
portrait painting, he first sought instruction 
in Philadelphia, and afterward in Boston, 
where he studied Copley's pictures. In 1770 
he went to England, and there studied with 
West, who, with his usual kindness, opened 
his heart and purse to the poor and strug- 
gling artist. Peale returned home after a 
residence of about four years abroad, and 
became an officer in the Revolutionary army. 
" He did not," says Tuckerman, " forget the 
artist in the soldier, but sedulously improved 
his leisure in camp by sketching from nature, 

and by transferring to his portfolio many 

heads which afterward he elaborated for his 
gallery of national portraits." His portrait 
of Washington as a Virginia colonel, well 
known through the art of engraving, pos- 
sesses a historical value as great as its ar- 
tistic merit. It was painted in 1772, and is 
the earliest authentic likeness of Washing- 
ton in existence. A subsequent portrait was 
executed by Peale in compliance with a res- 
olution of Congress, passed before the oc- 
cupation of Philadelphia. "Its progress," 
writes Titian R. Peale to a friend, "marks 
the vicissitudes of the Revolutionary strug- 
gle. Commenced in the gloomy winter and 
half-famished encampment at Valley Forgo 
in 1778, the battles of Trenton, Princeton, 
and Monmouth intervened before its com- 
pletion. At the last place Washington sug- 
gested that the view from the window of 
the farm-house opposite to which he was 
sitting would form a desirable background. 
Peale adopted the idea, and represented Mon- 
mouth Court-house, and a party of Hessians 
under guard marching out of it." Congress 
adjourned without making an appropriation 
for the payment of the artist, and the por- 
trait remained on his hands. The testimony 
of contemporaries stamps this picture as a 
most faithful likeness of Washington in the 
prime of life. Peale painted fourteen por- 
traits of Washington, of which the two we 
have mentioned are the most important. 
His career was long and honorable. His 
talent as a portrait painter in oil and min- 
iature was in constant demand far and wide, 
not only in this country, but by sitters from 
Canada and the West Indies. He died, re- 



GILBERT STUAET. 



409 



vered and regretted, at the age of eighty- 
four, in 1826. His son, Rembrandt Peale, at 
the age of eighteen, made a pencil sketch of 
Washington, and long afterward painted a 
portrait of him from memory, assisted by 
Houdin's bust. 

We must pass with only brief mention 
the names of William Dunlap, chiefly known 
for his history of the arts of design ; Robert 
Fulton, more celebrated as an inventor than 
as an artist ; John Wesley Jarvis, genial, 
gifted, and erratic ; Malbone, like Jarvis, cel- 
ebrated for his success in miniature paint- 
ing ; Chester Harding, once the rival of Stu- 
art in portraiture ; Gilbert Stuart Newton, 
whose memory is affectionately honored in 
Leslie's autobiography ; C. C. Ingham, one 
of the last of the old generation of por- 
trait painters ; and Morse, who early forsook 
painting, and w T hose name is connected with 
the most important invention of this centu- 
ry, the electric telegraph. Contemporary 
with these artists were many who achieved 
high reputation in their day, but whose 
names are now known only through the 
annals of art societies. 

One of the greatest portrait painters of 
America, Gilbert Charles Stuart, was also 
one of the earliest. He was born in Narra- 
gauset, Rhode Island, in 1754, according to 
an anecdote of his own, quoted by Dunlap, 
in a snuff mill, the first in New England, 
erected by his father. In after -years he 
dropped his middle name, which had been 




HENEY INMAN.— [1S01-1S46.] 




THOMAS OOLE.— [1801-1848.] 

given to him at his baptism to signify his 
father's fidelity to the royal house of Stuart. 
He commenced portrait painting at Newport, 
Rhode Island; was taken to Edinburgh at 
the age of eighteen ; resided several years 
in London, where his success was marked, 
and passed some time in Dublin and Paris. 
In 1793 Stuart returned to this countiy, and 
from that time till his death, at Boston, in 
1828, pursued a career of remarkable indus- 
try and ability. Many of the most famous 
statesmen of America sat to him, and his 
portraits of Washington, John Adams, Jef- 
ferson, Monroe, and other distinguished men 
are well known through engravings. Our 
ideas of Washington's personal appearance 
are derived from Stuart rather than from 
Pine or Peale. He also painted an immense 
number of society portraits. His works are 
widely scattered on both sides of the Atlan- 
tic. In power of drawing and expression, 
and in truth and purity of color, his por- 
traits stand almost without rival in Ameri- 
can or European art. He was great in the 
portrayal of individual character. Allston 
declared that he "seemed to dive into the 
thoughts of men, for they were made to live 
and speak on the surface." The same ad- 
mirable artist has also well said that Stuart 
" was, in its widest sense, a philosopher in 
his art. He thoroughly understood its prin- 
ciples, as his works bear witness, whether as 
to harmony of colors or of lines, or of light 
and shadow, showing that exquisite sense 



410 



PROGRESS OF THE FINE ARTS. 




HORATIO GREENOUGH. — [1805-1S52.] 

of a whole which only a man of genius can 
realize and embody. Of this not the least 
admirable instance is his portrait of John 
Adams, whose bodily tenement at the time 
seemed rather to present the image of a di- 
lapidated castle than the habitation of the 
unbroken mind. But not such is the pic- 
ture. Called forth from its crumbling re- 
cesses, the living tenant is there, still enno- 
bling the ruin, and upholdiug it, as it were, 
by the strength of his inner life." Stuart 
painted but three portraits of Washington 
from life, but made twenty-six copies of 
these originals. There is a certain weak- 
ness about the mouth, Washington having 
lost his teeth when the originals were paint- 
ed, but the general bearing is noble and dig- 
nified; and we may congratulate ourselves, 
with Leslie, " that a painter existed in the 
time of Washington who could hand him 
down looking like a gentleman." 

To sketch even in outline the career of 
every American artist who has achieved ce- 
lebrity in portraiture or any other branch 
of art would extend this article into a good- 
sized volume. Among those artists who be- 
longed partly to the last and partly to the 
present century, and whose genius has left 
a deep impression upon American art, may 
be mentioned John Vanderlyn, whose "Ari- 
adne" and "Marius" are justly celebrated, 
and who has given us the best portraits ex- 
tant of Madison, Monroe, Randolph, Clin- 
ton, Calhoun, and other eminent Americans ; 
and Thomas Sully, a native of England, but 



whose career belongs to America, and whose 
portraits are distinguished by exquisite grace 
and refinement. To the present century be- 
long many eminent names, such as Henry 
Inman, happiest in portraiture, but also 
charming in landscape, and the first Amer- 
ican artist who attempted genre painting 
with success ; William Page, who emulates 
Titian and Veronese as a colorist, whose 
portraits rank among the noblest of mod- 
ern times, and whose Venetian reproduc- 
tions have excited the highest admiration 
as well as the severest criticism; Charles 
Loring Elliot, whose portraits are distin- 
guished by richness of color, a manly sim- 
plicity and force of execution, combined 
with a subtile grasp of individuality which 
no other American portrait painter has 
evinced in an equal degree ; Daniel Hun- 
tington, whose versatile pencil, not confined 
to any single branch of art, is equally happy 
in portraiture, landscape, genre, and historic- 
al painting; Oliver Stone, recently deceased, 
whose portraits of women and children, in 
which he chiefly excelled, are characterized 
by a peculiar grace and refinement ; Thomas 
Le Clear; Richard M. Staigg, who, besides 
the exquisite ivory miniatures by which he 
is chiefly known, has shown a happy talent 
in genre painting; George A. Baker, whose 
portraits of women and children are of rare 
beauty and refinement. Other names might 
be mentioned did not want of space forbid. 
Historical painting has not found in Amer- 
ica the encouragement accorded to other 
branches of art, partly, perhaps, because we 
have never had a really great historical 
painter, and partly because the genius of 
the age does not favor it. Colonel John 
Trumbull attempted to depict the events of 
the Revolution in a series of large historical 
tableaux, which are now chiefly valued for 
the faithful portraits they contain of the 
soldiers and statesmen of that time. His 
sketches and studies for these works show 
a vigor and grasp which are wanting in the 
larger canvases. His " Death of Montgom- 
ery," the "Signing of the Declaration of In- 
dependence," and the "Battle of Bunker 
Hill," and others of his important works, 
exhibit considerable skill in grouping and 
composition, but it would have been better 
for his fame had nothing remained but the 
original sketches and portraits. His talent 



WASHINGTON ALLSTON. 



411 



is displayed to greater advantage in the 
" Trumbull Gallery" at New Haven than in 
the national Capitol. As aid-de-camp to 
General Washington in the early part of 
the Revolution, Colonel Trumbull enjoyed 
peculiar facilities for studying his character 
and features under the most varied circum- 
stances, and his portrait of him now in the 
gallery at New Haven is full of soldierly 
spirit. By contemporaries, to whom it re- 
called the leader of the American armies, it 
was preferred to Stuart's. 

Pre-eminent among American historical 
painters stands the honored name of Wash- 
ington Allston ; yet even of him it must be 
said that performance lagged far behind de- 
sign, and that his fame is in great part the 
legacy of contemporary admiration. The 
quality of his genius was akin to that of 
the old masters of religious art. It might 
be said of him that he painted for antiquity. 
His mind, even in youth inclined to serious 
contemplation, was moulded by early study 
of the old masters, and the results of this 
training may be traced in all his works. It 
was to him that Fuseli bluntly said, "You 
have come a great way to starve," when the 
young American, on his first visit to Lon- 
don, announced his purpose to devote him- 
self to historical painting. Nothing daunt- 
ed, Allston pursued his studies in England, 
France, and Italy with unflagging diligence, 
and with the grand goal of his ambition con- 
stantly in view. His earliest large picture, 
"The Dead Man Revived," obtained the prize 
of two hundred guineas from the British In- 
stitution, and was soon after purchased by 
the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. 
This was followed by a long list of impor- 
tant works, many of which are owned in 
England, where Allston enjoys even greater 
repute than in his own country. He suf- 
fered much from feeble health and from pe- 
cuniary embarrassment, and one of his most 
important works, " Belshazzar's Feast," re- 
mained, in consequence, unfinished at his 
death. His first studies for this painting 
were made in London in 1817. At intervals 
he worked upon it for nearly thirty years, and 
was engaged upon it on the last day of his 
life. Even in its unfinished state it attests 
the grandeur of the artist's conception, but 
it also reveals in a striking degree the lim- 
itations of his genius, chiefly the vacillation 



of thought, the wavering choice, displayed 
in changes of plan and apparent dissatisfac- 
tion with parts of the work as it proceeded. 
Allston himself regarded this picture as his 
greatest composition ; to finish it worthily 
was the desire of his heart ; but his genius 
found its best expression in some of his less 
ambitious paintings, in which his refined 
sense of the beautiful, his love of the grace- 
ful, and his intimate knowledge of form are 
allowed free play, untrammeled by the strug- 
gle to paint in the " grand style." 

Historical painting in America has been 
mainly, thus far at least, the reflex of Euro- 
pean schools of art. Trumbull's style was 
formed in London under the tuition of Ben- 




HIRAM POWERS. — [1805-1873.] 

jamin West, Allston's by long and conscien- 
tious study of the great masters of the Vene- 
tian schools, and Emanuel Leutze, our most 
vigorous and prolific historical painter in 
recent times, the engraving from whose pic- 
ture of "Washington crossing the Delaware" 
has carried his name into every American 
household, was the disciple of Lessing, with 
whom he studied at Dusseldorf. The con- 
ditions of American society are not, indeed, 
favorable to the development of this branch 
of art, which can not flourish without a pat- 
ronage which does not exist in this country. 
Our government patronage has been a posi- 
tive detriment to art. With few exceptions, 
the national commissions have been award- 



412 



PROGRESS OF THE FINE ARTS. 



ed to artists of inferior merit, whose success 
was often due to lobby influence. The con- 
sequence is that the national paintings at 
Washington are, with a few worthy excep- 
tions, a national disgrace. A blank white 
wall would be less displeasing to the culti- 
vated eye. It is, perhaps, vain to hope for 
a remedy. In the scramble for government 
art patronage, charlatans alone enter the 
course ; men of genius, whose productions 
would do the nation honor, will never de- 
scend to an unseemly scrub race with " art- 
ists'' who could hardly paint a respectable 
sign for a village tavern. Hence it is that 
while we occasionally see an American his- 
torical painting of high merit, the branches 
of art which most flourish in this country, 
and which have reached a degree of excel- 
lence unsurpassed in Europe, are portrait- 
ure, landscape, and genre painting. For cor- 
rect drawing, truth of color, and a fideli- 
ty to expression as nearly absolute as the 
art can be carried, American portrait paint- 
ers, as a class, stand in advance of their Eu- 
ropean brethren. There are no portraits in 
the world, if we except those of the old Ve- 
netian masters, superior in the highest qual- 
ities of art to those of Stuart, Elliot, Page, 
Huntington, Le Clear, Stone, Baker, and oth- 
ers who have devoted their genius to this 
branch of art. American portraiture may 
not display so much Academical " effect" as 
the French, but effect is not in itself an es- 
sential quality of high art. It is often an 
artistic trick to catch the uncultivated eye 
and hide defects of drawing. 

In landscape painting, as in portraiture, 
America very early declared her independ- 
ence of European schools. Our artists have 
gone directly to nature for inspiration, and 
each, following the tendency of his own 
genius, has found in her varied aspects of 
loveliness and grandeur what no Academical 
training could have taught. Fidelity to na- 
ture is a characteristic trait of American 
landscape art; a fidelity not servile, but 
conscientious and loving, with none of the 
con vcn tional trickery and Academical effects 
characteristic of every European school of 
landscape except the English ; a fidelity not 
inconsistent with tl^e widest display of im- 
agination and fancy, nor with freedom of in- 
dividual expression. If characteristic speci- 
mens of the art of each of our landscape 



painters, from the venerable Durand, whose 
hand has not yet forgot its cunning, to the 
youngest aspirant for a place on the walls 
of the Academy, could be gathered into one 
gallery, they would form an exhibition un- 
rivaled in the world in all the higher quali- 
ties of art, in individuality, and in truth to 
nature. Such a collection— a nucleus al- 
ready exists in our Metropolitan Museum 
of Art — ought to find a place in New York. 
How interesting to the student would it be 
to trace the development of landscape art 
in the pictures of Durand, Cole, Huntington, 
Inness, Church, Bierstadt, Gilford, Keusett, 
Whittredge, M'Eutee, Column, Hubbard, and 
a host of others who have won deserved hon- 
ors by their faithful delineations of nature! 
The limits of this sketch preclude extended 
personal characterizations where so many 
deserve special notice ; and equally out of 
the question is even the briefest account of 
what the most eminent have accomplished 
toward bringing American landscape art to 
its present high position. 

In more senses than one such an exhi- 
bition would be essentially American ; for 
although many of our foremost landscape 
painters have gone abroad for study or in 
search of special aspects of nature, they 
have found in the grandeur and in the beau- 
ty of our own country the highest inspira- 
tion. Gifford brings nothing from Venice or 
the East superior to his niaguificent tran- 
scripts of the scenery of the Hudson and the 
sea-coast, although that element of the pic- 
turesque afforded by the architecture of the 
Old World is wanting in the New ; nor did 
Church find in the Andes inspiration for a 
nobler picture thau his "Niagara." Bier- 
stadt's splendid delineations of the sublime 
scenery of California and the Rocky Mount- 
ains far surpass his " Vesuvius." Thomas 
Cole found in the Catskills the material for 
his most beautiful pictures ; and where but 
in America could M'Entee have become the 
interpreter of those autumnal effects which 
he renders with such beauty and fidelity ? 
The happiest efforts of Kensett were in- 
spired by years of patient study among the 
mountains of New England and New York, 
the lakes and rivers of the Middle States, 
and along the Eastern sea -coast. Whit- 
tredge's magnificent pictures of Western 
scenery cast into the shade his earlier 



GENRE PAINTERS. 



413 



though beautiful views on the Rhine. But 
the list is almost inexhaustible ; it would 
include nearly every eminent landscape 
painter in America. 

Several of our most eminent landscapists 
are known also as successful marine paint- 
ers. Colman began his artistic career by 
painting shipping and sea views. Many of 
the finest pictures of Keusett and GiU'ord 
represent various aspects of the sea in con- 
nection with views of the coast. One of 
Church's most important compositions is his 
picture of a gigantic iceberg floating majes- 
tically in a tranquil expanse of ocean. Will- 
iam Bradford has devoted himself almost 
exclusively to the delineation of the arctic 
seas, with their rugged glacier-riven coasts, 
their icebergs, and their terrible ice-plains, 
the scene of adventure and disaster. Among 
our most noteworthy marine painters may 
be mentioned F. H. De Haas, a native of 
Rotterdam, but for mauy years a resident 
of this country. His pictures of sea storms 
are strong and effective ; and he has also 
painted many beautiful coast scenes. Charles 
Temple Dix, had his life been spared, would 
have achieved great success in this branch 
of painting. 

In figure and genre painting we have the 
names of many gifted and accomplished 
artists, such as Eastman Johnson, Edwin 
White, E. W. Perry, Matteson, S. Mount, J. 
Wood, J. G. Brown, John W. Ehninger, Eli- 
hu Vedder, George H. Boughton, W. J. Hen- 
nessy, R. C. Woodville, and others. Mr. 
White is also a careful and admired portrait 
painter, and has essayed historical composi- 
tion with marked success. Mr. Johnson 
stands at the head of American genre paint- 
ers. He was among the first to recognize 
in American life the picturesque and char- 
acteristic traits which our artists were once 
fain to seek abroad. Thanks to his intui- 
tion and to the example of his admirable 
achievements, American genre painting now 
rivals that of auy European nation in vari- 
ety and excellence, and gives promise of 
greater triumphs in the future. 

The best animal painter in America is W. 
H. Beard, whose half-humorous, half-serious 
compositions have not been excelled by any 
other artist at home or abroad. He has a 
special penchant for bears, and has made 
them the medium of caustic satire ou hu- 




THOMAS CRAWFORD. — [1813-1857.] 

inanity, as in his " Bears on a Bender" — a 
picture which established his name, and the 
great success of which influenced his career. 
His brother, James H. Beard, also an animal 
painter of merit, employs his pencil almost 
exclusively in the delineation of domestic 
animals. The late William Hays painted 
many admirable animal pictures, of which 
the most important are " The Stampede" and 
"The Herd on the Move." The names of 
Tait and Bispham must also be included in 
the list of painters who have made special 
study of animal life, and have been success- 
ful in the delineation of it. 

The list of American sculptors embraces a 
number of eminent names, beginning with 
that of Horatio Greenough, from whose hand 
came the first marble group executed by an 
American. Sculpture, as is well known, was 
not popular in this country for some years 
after the Revolution. Nude statuary was 
especially an abomination not to be toler- 
ated ; and Greenough, Crawford, and Pow- 
ers waited many years and endured keen 
disappointments before they received pop- 
ular recoguitiou. Their residence abroad, 
rendered necessary by the absence of the 
proper facilities for the prosecution of their 
art at home, removed them in a great measure 
from popular sympathy, and their achieve- 
ments, except by report, were known to a 
comparatively small number of people. But 
travel, culture, familiarity with foreign gal- 
leries, and the more general distribution of 
casts and statuary throughout the country 
have produced a marked change in popular 
ideas. Statuary forms a more or less im- 



414 



PROGRESS OF THE FINE ARTS. 



portant part of every Academy exhibition, 
and it is no longer necessary to set apart a 
day exclusively for the admission of ladies. 
Nor is it longer essential that an American 
sculptor should reside in Italy, or go abroad 
at all, except for the purpose of study among 
the masterpieces of antique art. Several of 
our most eminent sculptors pursue their art 
at home, and retain an individuality which 
might be endangered, in some degree at 
least, by a foreign residence. Our foremost 
living sculptor, J. Q. A. Ward, achieved sev- 
eral signal triumphs in his art, without the 
advantages supposed to be only attainable 
abroad. His " Indian Huuter," his " Freed- 
man," his statue of Shakspeare, now in Cen- 




JOHN F. KENBETT. — [1818-1ST2.] 

tral Park, and his numerous portrait busts, 
all attest the vigor and originality of his 
genius. Ward is the most thoroughly Amer- 
ican of all our sculptors. Greenough, Craw- 
ford, Powers, Story, went early to the studios 
of Florence or Rome, and in the contempla- 
tion of ancient .art they lost the inspiration 
of the New World, and became European 
artists, not to be distinguished, by any char- 
acteristic of their work, from the English, 
French, German, and Italian sculptors sur- 
rounding them. Palmer, like Ward, never 
studied abroad, and yet, despite certain pe- 
culiar theories in regard to his art, he has 
produced some admirable work. Besides 



the artists already named, among those who 
have acquired distinction as American sculp- 
tors may be named Thomas Ball, Henry 
Kirke Brown, Randolph Rogers; Joel T. 
Hart, of Kentucky; and Launt Thompson, 
who, though born in Ireland, has become 
thoroughly Americanized. He acquired his 
art with Palmer, in whose studio he remain- 
ed about nine years. Thompson has exe- 
cuted some very characteristic portrait 
busts aud several statues of great merit, the 
most important being that of General Sedg- 
wick. The varied genre groups of John 
Rogers, chiefly representing scenes and epi- 
sodes of the late war, entitle this artist to a 
permanent, if not very lofty, place among 
American sculptors. Several American wom- 
en, among them Miss Harriet Hosmer, Miss 
Margaret Foley, and Miss Emma Stebbins, 
have also attained high repute as sculptors. 

The art of engraving has reached a high 
degree of excellence in America during the 
hundred years which have elapsed since 
Paul Revere, the hero of the memorable ride 
celebrated in Longfellow's verse, engraved 
caricatures and historical subjects in Bos- 
ton. Revere worked on copper, an art 
which, like lithography, has been almost 
driven out of existence by wood-engraving. 
The first wood-engraver in America was Dr. 
Anderson, who died a few years since at the 
age of ninety-five, having, in the course of 
his long career, seen the art advance from 
a rude state to the finish and refinement it 
has attained in the hands of such men as 
Linton and Anthony, and of men who are 
second to these masters only. Wood-en- 
graving has been a powerful agent in the 
dissemination of a knowledge and love of 
art throughout the country, not only by the 
reproduction of the works of eminent mas- 
ters of Europe and America, but by spread- 
ing broadcast through illustrated books, 
magazines, and journals the artistic crea- 
tions of Darley, Hoppin, Fredricks, Nast, Mo- 
ran, Sol Eytinge, and a hundred others who 
have devoted their talents to illustration. 

The history of caricature in the United 
States has been so recently and so amply 
given by Mr. Parton in the pages of Harpers 
Magazine tbat it is only necessary here to 
note some of the leading names in this de- 
partment of art. Among political carica- 
turists Thomas Nast stands without a rival 



GROWTH OF ART CULTURE. 



415 



in the vigor and sharpness of his satire and 
in versatility of invention. In social cari- 
cature we have Sol Eytiuge, whose inimita- 
ble delineations of the humorous side of 
negro character excite genial amusement, 
but never derisive laughter ; Belle w, Woolf, 
Reinhart, Frost, Wust, Thomas Worth, Hop- 
kins, and many others, whose names would 
fill a large catalogue. 

Looking back through the hundred years 
of our existence as an independent nation, 
we see a steady and healthful growth of art 
in all sections of the country. Year by 
year the number of American artists has in- 
creased with the diffusion of culture among 
the people ; art societies are springing up 
in all parts of the country ; exhibitions 
worthy of the Old World are held in cities 
where fifty years ago there was scarcely a 
break in the primeval forest. Europe sends 
us yearly an accession of artists, who be- 



come American, as West, Copley, and Les- 
lie became English painters. Schools of art 
spread culture and knowledge all over the 
land. Massachusetts has made drawing a 
part of her system of common-school educa- 
tion with admirable results. The art school 
conuected with the Cooper Union in this city 
has also done great service in the way of 
elementary training in drawing, painting, 
wood-engraving, etc. The work begun by 
the American Institute of Architects awak- 
ens the hope that another generation will 
see a vast improvement in the architecture 
of our public and private buildings. As 
wealth and culture increase, the fine arts 
will find increasing support, and the com- 
ing century will witness a development in 
the sculpture, painting, and architecture 
of this country as marvelous as its progress 
has been in the mechanical and industrial 
arts. 



XIV. 

MEDICAL AND SANITARY PROGRESS. 



WHAT has been done in these United 
States of America since the declara- 
tion of their independence in the way of 
medical and sanitary progress ? To answer 
this question fully it would be necessary to 
write the history of American medicine, for 
which at least a volume would be required. 
In undertaking to review the past centen- 
nial period, with reference to this question, 
within the limits of a few pages, I must be 
content with a large outline and certain 
representative facts. 

Evidence of progress is to be sought for 
in educational institutions. At the close 
of the colonial government there were two 
American medical colleges, one in Philadel- 
phia, the other in New York ; the former es- 
tablished in 1765, and the latter in 1768. The 
operations of both were suspended during 
the Revolutionary war. Up to that time 
they had conferred medical degrees upon 
less than fifty candidates. The great ma- 
jority of the physicians and surgeons in the 
colonies had obtained what education they 
possessed in commencing practice by having 
served for a period of from three to seven 
years as apprentices to medical practition- 
ers, the duties of apprenticeship emhracing 
certain menial offices as well as study and the 
compounding of medicines. A favored few 
were able to resort to the celebrated schools 
of London, Edinburgh, and Leyden. At the 
close of the war the two American colleges 
resumed operations, and three others came 
into existence before the end of the eight- 
eenth century, namely, the medical depart- 
ment of Harvard University, of Dartmouth 
College, and of Rutgers College, of New Jer- 
sey. The number of graduates from all these 
institutions at the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century had not much exceeded two 
hundred. During the first half of the pres- 
ent century medical colleges were multi- 
plied nearly at the rate of a new college 
annually, distributed among the different 
.States, and many of them established in 
small villages. This multiplication and dis- 
tribution met the requirements of medical 



education at that time, in view of the rapid 
settlement of distant parts of our vast coun- 
try, stage-coaches being the only public 
mode of traveling by laud, and the great ma- 
jority of studeuts aud practitioners in med- 
icine having limited pecuniary resources. 
After the extension of railway communica- 
tions and the development of the material 
resources of newly settled States and Terri- 
tories, the increase in the number of col- 
leges was less, and for the most part it has 
been confined to metropolitan or large 
towns, many of those in villages having 
been discontinued. At the present time 
about seven thousand medical students at- 
tend annually the various colleges, aud the 
annual number of graduates exceeds two 
thousand. 1 During the last quarter of a 
century there has been progressive improve- 
ment in collegiate and extra-collegiate in- 
struction by means of extension of the terms 
of lectures, subdivisions of the different de- 
partments, the institution of special courses, 
combiuing more and more illustrations with 
didactic teaching, the systematic regulation 
of study with recitations, and private lect- 
ures or demonstrations in various branches. 
Without presumption, it may be claimed 
in behalf of the leading American medical 
schools that especially, although not exclu- 
sively, as regards practical instruction, they 
compare favorably with the long -distin- 
guished schools in Great Britain, France, 
and Germany. 

In connection with this sketch of educa- 
tional institutions it is but just to the med- 
ical profession of this country to present 
certain facts. To this profession belongs 
chiefly whatever credit may pertain to the 
rise and progress of these institutions now 
aud in the past. Our State Legislatures in- 
corporate medical colleges, and generally 
charters are obtained without difficulty. 
Legislative aid in the way of money is the 

1 Vide Toner's A nnals of Medical Progress for these 
and other statistics. For the dates of the establish- 
ment of different schools and other details, vide History 
of Medical Education, etc., by N. S. Davis, M.D. 



MEDICAL SOCIETIES. 



417 



exception, not the rule, albeit it is very evi- 
dent that well-educated physicians and sur- 
geons are literally of vital importance to the 
public weal. As a rule, with some notable 
exceptions, the pecuniary means for the es- 
tablishment of a medical school are not 
largely furnished either by municipal ap- 
propriations or private contributions from 
other than members of the medical profes- 
sion. After having been established, the 
revenue of the colleges is derived commonly 
from the fees of students : few colleges have 
any endowment. A certain measure of suc- 
cess in a medical school, as regards the size 
of its classes, is therefore essential to its 
continuance, and its prosperity depends on 
the number of students attracted to it. The 
primary organization and the management 
in all respects, including the appointment 
of professors, are usually, either directly or 
indirectly, under the control of the faculties 
of the schools. These facts involve some 
objections which are plausible, and in a 
measure veritable, namely, a medical col- 
lege can not, without risk of its prosperity, 
require a higher grade of preliminary edu- 
cation or of the qualifications for a degree 
than those institutions with which it is in 
immediate competition, and professional po- 
sitions are exposed to insecurity from the 
action of colleagues. On the other hand, 
there are advantages which more than out- 
weigh these objections. An active, honor- 
able competition enforces the best exertions, 
the selection of the ablest teachers, and the 
largest available facilities for instruction. 

Another fact, in justice to the profession, 
should be presented, namely, there are prac- 
tically no legal restrictions on the practice 
of medicine in most of the States of the Un- 
ion. Not only are licenses to practice easily 
obtained, but rarely, if ever, are legal pen- 
alties, if they exist, enforced for practicing 
without a diploma or a license. The desire 
for instruction is therefore the leading mo- 
tive impelling medical students to resort to 
medical schools. Moreover, the classes, es- 
pecially in metropolitan medical schools, 
consist in part of licentiates or graduates 
who have been for a greater or less period 
engaged in practice. Again, in the schools 
which are considered as offering the largest 
advantages the classes preponderate greatly 
in numbers over those in other schools. At 
27 



the present time more than a thousand stu- 
dents and practitioners are in attendance at 
the schools in the city of New York during 
the winter, and the winter classes in Phila- 
delphia are not much smaller. A consider- 
able proportion of the members of the class- 
es in these two cities is from distant parts 
of our country, the fees are considerably 
higher than in provincial schools, and the 
expenses incident to city life and long jour- 
neys are not small. Herein is exemplified 
the strength of the impelling motive, name- 
ly, the desire for instruction ; and these facts 
certainly denote a spirit of progress among 
those who are already, and those who are 
about to become, members of the medical 
profession. 

We are to look for evidence of progress 
in the number and character of associa- 
tions for the promotion and diffusion of 
medical knowledge. Prior to the Eevolu- 
tionary war there was but one State med- 
ical society. This was formed in New Jer- 
sey in 1766, but not regularly incorporated 
until 1790. Shortly before the war closed, 
the Massachusetts Medical Society was in- 
corporated. After the national independ- 
ence was achieved, associations were speed- 
ily organized in several of the States. At 
the beginning of the present century they 
existed in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New 
Hampshire, South Carolina, Connecticut, 
and Maryland. Following these were local 
associations iu different counties and large 
towns. At the present time probably ev- 
ery State in the Union has its society, and 
there are few situations so remote or iso- 
lated as not to be embraced within the 
area of some local association. In 1846 a 
convention of representatives of medical so- 
cieties, hospitals, and colleges throughout 
the United States was held in the city of 
New York, and the result was the estab- 
lishment, in 1847, of the American Medical 
Association, which, excepting dui'ing the 
late war of the rebellion, has ever since 
held annual meetings in different parts of 
the Union. Quite recently (1872) an asso- 
ciation has been formed for the promotion 
and diffusion of knowledge relating to the 
prevention of disease. This, entitled the 
Public Health Association, gives promise of 
much usefulness. National societies within 
late years have been formed for the promo- 



418 



MEDICAL AND SANITARY PROGRESS. 



tion and diffusion of knowledge relating to 
special departments of medicine — for exam- 
ple, insanity, and diseases of the eye and 
ear — and local societies of this character 
exist in most of the larger cities. All of the 
numerous associations originated with med- 
ical men, and have heen kept up hy their ef- 
forts. Many publish Transactions at stated 
intervals. The American Medical Associa- 
tion has published twenty-five large vol- 
umes, and the New York State Medical So- 
ciety nearly or quite as many. Collective- 
ly, the Transactions of the societies in vari- 
ous States constitute not an inconsiderable 
portion of our periodical medical literature. 
The associations are all A r oluntary ; mem- 
bership is not rendered obligatory by legal 
requirement, but in many, if not in most, 
parts of the country it is considered essen- 
tial to an unequivocal professional status to 
become a member of some regularly organ- 
ized association. This arises from the fact 
that in certain associations are vested, by 
general agreement, the right to take cog- 
nizance of violations of medical ethics by 
any of their members, and to reprimand, 
suspend, or expel for unprofessional con- 
duct. Passing by further details, it may 
be said of our medical associations that in 
number and character they denote a gener- 
al and active co-operation of the practi- 
tioners of medicine for the promotion and 
diffusion of knowledge, to which may be 
added the maintenance and elevation of the 
honor and usefulness of the profession. The 
associations thus furnish evidence, while 
they are also important means, of medical 
sanitary progress. 

Tbe literature of a particular province of 
science and art, for a given period, offers a 
good criterion of the progress made during 
that period. This statement is as applica- 
ble to medicine as to any department of 
knowledge. Comparing the present with 
the past, in this aspect, as in other points of 
contrast, due consideration is to be given to 
the difference in population, which at the 
time independence was declared was not 
much over 3,000,000, while at the present 
time it is estimated to be about 40,000,000.' 

During the colonial government there 
was not entire absence of an American med- 

1 Toner, op. cit. 



ical literature. Davis gives a list of twen- 
ty-eight publications, most of which were 
works of small or moderate size, but several 
of them possessing much merit on the score 
of originality and ability. There was no 
American medical periodical during this pe- 
riod, the first being the Medical Repository, the 
publication of which was commenced in the 
city of New York in 1797. This was a quar- 
terly of about 150 pages, ably conducted, and 
its publication ceased with the twenty-third 
volume. In 1804 the publication of two 
medical journals was commenced in Phila- 
delphia. The subsequent multiplication of 
medical periodicals and their publication in 
different parts of the Union constitute strik- 
ing evidence of progress. At the present 
time there are between thirty and forty med- 
ical journals published in the United States, 
not including the Transactions of societies, 
hospital reports, and other publications prop- 
erly belonging to periodical literature. The 
history of medical journalism in this country 
during the last half century would show 
many changes, but it is noteworthy that a 
quarterly journal, The American Journal of 
Medical Sciences, established in 1827, succeed- 
ing the Philadelphia Journal of the Medical 
and Physical Sciences, established in 1820, still 
lives, the arrangement of contents never 
having been changed, the present publisher 
the successor of the house which from the 
first issued this, as also the preceding work, 
and conducted now by the same able editor 
as over forty years ago. The Boston Medic- 
al and Surgical Journal, with divers changes, 
has been in existence for about the same 
length of time. 

The bibliography of the first quarter of 
the present century embraces not a few able 
works, among which the voluminous writ- 
ings of Rush are prominent. The standard 
works and text-books, however, were chiefly 
of foreign authorship. During the second 
quarter the number of works by American 
authors had largely increased, the list em- 
bracing acceptable text-books in anatomy, 
physiology, surgery, midwifery, the practice 
of medicine, and the materia .medica. Then, 
as now, the absence of any international 
copyright restrictions favored the republi- 
cation of works by British in preference to 
those by native authors, the former having 
the advantage of a success already acquired, 



MEDICAL LITERATURE. 



419 



and the reprint requiring no royalty. Here 
is an obstacle in the way of the develop- 
ment and progress of a national literature 
which, in justice to American authors, should 
be borne in mind. Notwithstanding this 
obstacle, and a prevailing sentiment that 
exotics transplanted from tbe older coun- 
tries, as a matter of course, are superior to 
native productions, the increase of original 
books has been progressive during the last 
twenty-five years. At this moment the ma- 
jority of the works recognized by medical 
schools and the profession as text-books in 
the different departments of medical educa- 
tion are by American authors, and there are 
few topics within the range of the science 
and art of medicine which are not credita- 
bly represented in our own literature. At 
the same time, foreign books and periodical 
publications now, as heretofore, bave a large 
circulation in this country. Our native 
productions do not displace exotics, but both 
flourish together, competiug with a fair ri- 
valry. 

Medical progress, as evidenced in the lit- 
erature of medicine, is more especially mark- 
ed in works of a practical character. This 
is owing to the fact that the vast majority 
of those who pursue medical studies in this 
couutry have chiefly in view the duties and 
responsibilities of the practitioner. The 
prosecution of researches of a purely scien- 
tific character, having no immediate prac- 
tical bearing, is comparatively rare. It is 
easy to explain the lack of progress in this 
direction, as shown by comparison with oth- 
er countries. The rapid increase of our pop- 
ulation and its extension over new territory 
have involved a large demand for practi- 
tioners, a large proportion of whom are, to 
a greater or less extent, isolated as regards 
much intercourse with each other, and 
therefore obliged to depend greatly on 
their own resources in medical and surgical 
practice. Hence a predominant desire for 
knowledge which is plainly and directly 
practical. Another and more potential rea- 
son is the absence of inducements or even 
encouragement for purely scientific research- 
es beyond their intrinsic attractions. Our 
collegiate institutions, from want of endow- 
ment, are unable to make adequate provis- 
ions for investigations which have no ap- 
preciable relations to practical teaching ; 



the policy of our State governments, al- 
ready referred to, is to leave the cultivation 
of all the departments of medicine in the 
hands of the medical profession, without 
offering incitements or rewards, and the 
spirit of emulation is not what it would 
be were there a larger number in the field 
of original scientific investigations. These 
are the reasons for the fact that the med- 
ical literature of this country up to the 
present time, as compared with that of oth- 
er countries, is deficient in what may be 
distinguished as scientific in contrast with 
practical medicine. A list of American pub- 
lications relating to medicine and sanitary 
science during the last hundred years would 
show a steadily increasing progress in this 
direction, and such a list would include not 
an inconsiderable number of works of a 
purely scientific character. The reader who 
may desire information concerning the med- 
ical bibliography of our country is referred 
to a late publication, entitled History of 
American Medical Literature from, 1776 to the 
Present Time, by Professor S. D. Gross, of 
Philadelphia. 

Within the past few years subjects relat- 
ing to sanitary knowledge have entered into 
our literature more largely than heretofore. 
The publications by Health Boards have 
been of much interest and value. These 
subjects have also occupied a considerable 
share of medical journals aud the Transac- 
tions of medical associations, aud at the 
present time there is at least one journal 
devoted specially to this department *of 
knowledge. It is fair to acknowledge that 
the recent activity in this direction is in a 
great measure due to the labors prosecuted 
under governmental co-operation and sup- 
port in Great Britain and other countries. 
The attention now given to what has been 
called "preventive medicine" may be espe- 
cially referred to as evidence of progress. 
To promote public health by removing or 
lessening the causes of disease, to forestall 
epidemics and endemics or arrest their 
course, are objects of medical science high- 
er in importance than therapeutics. The 
truth of this statement is recognized by the 
philosophic and philanthropic physician; 
and there is ground for the belief that al- 
ready the study of sanitary science has led 
to the saving of much life. Were it con- 



420 



MEDICAL AND SANITARY PROGRESS. 



sistent with the limits of this article, I 
might cite the facts in the history of epi- 
demic cholera in the city of New York in 
1866 and 1867 as proof that hy prompt and 
efficient preventive measures this disease 
may he effectually " stamped out." ' Sani- 
tary science and medical science are to a 
great extent convertible terms, as implied 
in the name, preventive medicine. The 
prevention of diseases is the practical re- 
sult of our knowledge of their character 
and causes. Our knowledge of the causes 
of diseases, more especially of the special 
causes which give rise to epidemics and en- 
demics, is confessedly defective ; thus far in 
the history of medical and sanitary prog- 
ress we have been obliged to content our- 
selves with the investigation of their laws 
without being able to determine with pos- 
itiveness their essential nature and mode 
of production. Conceding this, it is, per- 
haps, not an extravagant assertion to say 
that, with our present knowledge and ex- 
perience, by means of the skillful employ- 
ment of disinfecting agents, together with 
other sanitary measures, the prevalence of 
certain diseases — epidemic cholera and yel- 
low fever — is within the power of scien- 
tific control. In this direction of progress 
there is reason to hope that much will be 
accomplished by continued investigations. 
For carrying on these investigations and 
enforcing sanitary measures the co-opera- 
tion of the public and legal powers is es- 
sential; hence the importance of awakening 
public interest on the subject, and diffusing 
as far as practicable popular information. 

In this connection may be mentioned im- 
provement in quarantine regulations. The 
problem in the department of sanitary sci- 
ence relating to quarantine is to provide to 
the utmost extent for the public health, 
with the least interference with personal 
freedom and the interests of commerce. A 
review of the history of quarantine laws 
would show how great has been the progress 
toward the solution of this problem, as a 
result of the increase of knowledge of the 
causes of disease and of preventive meas- 
ures. From the necessity of resisting a 
temptation to enter into details, I must be 



1 Vide reports of the Metropolitan Board of Health, 
New York, for these years. 



content with the general statement that 
the quarantine regulations of our large 
commercial cities at the present time ex- 
emplify the progress made within late years 
in this most important matter. 1 

Medical and sanitary progress, as evi- 
denced by important discoveries or improve- 
ments, next claims attention. Of course 
those originating in this country are more 
especially characteristic of American prog- 
ress, yet the ready adoption of discoveries 
and improvements which have originated in 
other countries is significant of a progress- 
ive spirit. 

The greatest event in the medical history 
of the last centennial period, the whole 
world included, was the announcement of 
the discovery of vaccination. Jenner an- 
nounced his discovery in a paper " printed 
for the author" in 1798. He had desired 
that the paper should appear under the au- 
spices of the Royal Society of London, but 
it was declined bythat learned body on the 
ground that its publication would damage 
the reputation which the author had al- 
ready acquired by some observations on the 
cuckoo ! If wo recognize as a criterion of 
the importance of a discovery the saving of 
human life, that of Jenner far transcends 
any other in the history of the world. A 
medical writer in 1849 represents the num- 
ber of lives saved as follows : " In England 
alone the absolute mortality from small-pox 
is less by 20,000 a year than it was half a 
century ago. If a similar rate of reduction 
in the number of deaths from small-pox 
holds good, as we have every reason to be- 
lieve is the case, in the other kingdoms of 
Europe, then, out of the 220,000,000 of peo- 
ple that inhabit this quarter of the globe, 
400,000 or 500,000 fewer now die of small- 
pox than, with a similar population, would 
have died from this malady fifty years ago. 
During the long European wars con- 
nected with and following the French Rev- 
olution it has been calculated that five or 
six millions of human lives were lost. In 
Europe vaccination has already preserved 
from death a greater number of human be- 



1 The reader interested in this matter is referred to 
a paper entitled Quarantine: General Principles af- 
fecting its Organization, by S. Oakley Vanderpoel, 
M.D., Health Officer of the port of New York, etc., 
1875. 



INTRODUCTION OF VACCINATION. 



421 



ings than were sacrificed during the course 
of these wars. The laucet of Jenner has 
saved far more human lives than the sword 
of Napoleon destroyed." ' 

The introduction of vaccination met with 
virulent opposition in England. It was 
scouted by many as entailing on man dis- 
eases of inferior animals, as likely to cause 
a physical and mental deterioration of the 
human race, and as an impious attempt at 
interference with the ordinances of Provi- 
dence, so that many years elapsed before 
the importance of the discovery was prac- 
tically recognized in the country so much 
honored by the nativity of the discoverer. 
We have a right to take credit for the 
promptness with which vaccination was 
adopted in this country, and for its being 
popularized with comparatively small oppo- 
sition. In 1799 Professor Benjamin Water- 
house, in Boston, having obtained the virus 
from Jenner, vaccinated four of his own 
children. In 1801 Dr. Valentine Seaman 
procured virus from the arm of a patient 
who had been vaccinated by Dr. Water- 
house, and performed the first vaccination 
in the city of New York ; and in 1802 an in- 
stitution was established in New York for 
the purpose of vaccinating the poor gratui- 
tously and keeping up a supply of the virus. 
Not going into further details, may not the 
introduction of vaccination in this country 
be cited as indicating at that day a spirit 
of medical and sanitary progress ? 

Numerous examples of the ready adoption 
in this country of discoveries and improve- 
ments of lesser magnitude than the discov- 
ery of vaccination might be cited in illus- 
tration of a spirit of progress. I will 
mention but two of these, namely, the dis- 
covery of auscultation, and the employment 
of the thermometer in the study of diseases. 
Laennec's discovery of auscultation was au 
event of great importance in the history of 
medicine. By means of the physical signs 
determined by listening to sounds within 
the chest, the different affections of the 
lungs and heart are now readily distin- 
guished from each other, and our knowl- 
edge of the symptoms and laws of these 
affections has been brought to great per- 
fection. The great work by Laennec on aus- 

1 Sir James Simpson on anaesthesia, etc., 1849. 



cultation was published in Paris in 1819. 
It was translated into English by Dr. 
Forbes, of London, in 1821. The impor- 
tance of this new method of examination 
was not at once appreciated either in France 
or other countries in Europe. It met with 
indifierence, skepticism, and ridicule. At 
that time crossing the Atlantic for medical 
improvement was a great undertaking. 
Nevertheless, not a few of the young med- 
ical men of this country resorted to Paris, 
London, and Edinburgh with that purpose. 
The stethoscope of Laennec, through their 
agency, was speedily in use on this side of 
the Atlantic. The writer can testify that, 
as far back as 1832, the facts of ausculta- 
tion entered largely into medical teaching. 
At this time an important physical sign had 
been discovered by a most promising Amer- 
ican physician, who died as he was just en- 
tering upon an active professional life. 1 
In 1836 a prize was offered for competitive 
dissertations on this together with other 
methods of exploration, the successful com- 
petitor being Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose 
early labors in medicine were of a character 
to occasion in the minds of those devoted to 
this department of knowledge a feeling of 
regret that his talents have been diverted 
to the pursuits of literature, iu which he 
has achieved such great distinction. 

The employment of the thermometer in 
practical medicine is of recent date. Al- 
though advocated and to some extent ex- 
emplified by previous medical observers, it 
is chiefly owing to the labors of Wun- 
derlich, in Germany, that this instrument 
is now in common use iu the practice of 
medicine. Simple as seems the proposi- 
tion to determine the heat of the body in 
diseases by exact measurement, in place of 
the fallacious evidence afforded by the sen- 
sations of the patient or the physician's 
touch, its importance has only been appre- 
ciated within the last ten or fifteen years. 
Wunderlich's labors have established cer- 
tain thermometric laws in disease which 
are now considered as of great value in es- 
timating danger and in discriminating dis- 
eases from each other. The promptness with 
which medical thermometry was adopted in 
this country, and the very general use of 

i James Jackson, Jun., of Boston. 



422 



MEDICAL AND SANITARY PROGRESS. 



the thermometer, may be mentioned as evi- 
dence of a spirit of progress. 1 

Passing now to discoveries and improve- 
ments originated in this country, I must re- 
strict myself to certain of those which are 
prominent, overlooking much that it would 
he culpable to omit in a history of American 
medicine. Adopting a chronological ar- 
rangement, the formidable surgical opera- 
tion known as ovariotomy is the first in the 
series. 

This operation was performed for the first 
time by Ephraim M'Dowell, of Danville, 
Kentucky, in 1809. After having performed 
it in two other instances, he reported very 
briefly the three cases in the Eclectic Reper- 
tory and Analytical Review, in 1816. The op- 
eration was successful in each of the three 
cases. He subsequently performed it ten 
times, making the whole number of cases 
thirteen, of which eight, at least, were suc- 
cessful. Although never before performed, 
the possibility and propriety of the opera- 
tion had beeu advocated, especially by John 
Bell, a distinguished teacher of anatomy 
and surgery in Edinburgh. M'Dowell was 
a private pupil of Bell in 1793 and 1794, and 
it is probable that the determination was 
then formed to undertake the operation 
whenever the opportunity offered. 

M'Dowell's report of cases was received 
with incredulity, and the operation was not 
repeated by any other surgeon until the 
year 1821, when it was performed by Nathan 
Smitb, Professor of Surgery in Yale College. 
It was performed by the latter surgeon with- 
out the knowledge of M'Dowell's previous 
operations. For more than twenty years it 
was practically almost ignored in this coun- 
try, and during the next twenty years it en- 
countered much opposition from members 
of the medical profession. Within the last 
fifteen years this opposition has in a great 
measure ceased, and the number of opera- 
tions has progressively increased, so that in 
1871 the number of reported cases amounted 
to 739, an analysis of 660 of the cases giving 
a success of sixty-eight per cent. 3 



' The remarks in relation to the thermometer are 
equally applicable to two still more recent improve- 
ments in the means of investigating the phenomena 
of disease, namely, the ophthalmoscope and the laryn- 
goscope. 

1 Peaslee on ovarian tumors, 1S72. 



M'Dowell's report of his first three cases 
was published in Great Britain in 1824. 
Here too it was received with incredulity. 
The editor of the most influential of the 
English medical journals at that time, the 
Medical and Chirurgical Review, applied the 
quotation, Credat Judwus, non ego. Subse- 
quently he used this language : "In despite 
of all that has been written respecting this 
cruel operation, we entirely disbelieve that 
it has ever been performed with success, nor 
do we think it ever will." Having quoted 
this extract, another should be added, taken 
from the same journal of the following year 
(1826): "A back settlement of America — 
Kentucky — has beaten the mother country, 
nay, Europe itself, with all the boasted sur- 
geons thereof, in the fearful and formidable 
operation of gastrotomy with extraction of 
diseased ovaries. In the second volume of 
this series we adverted to the cases of Dr. 
M'Dowell, of Kentucky, published by Mr. 
Lizars, of Edinburgh, and expressed our- 
selves as skeptical respecting their authen- 
ticity. Dr. Coates, however, has now given 
us much more cause for wonder at the suc- 
cess of Dr. M'Dowell ; for it appears that 
out of five cases operated on in Kentucky 
by Dr. M'Dowell, four recovered after the 
operation, and only one died. There were 
circumstances in the narratives of the first 
three cases that caused misgivings in our 
minds, for which uncharitableuess we ask 
pardon of God and Dr. M'Dowell of Dan- 
ville." The first cases in Scotland proving 
unsuccessful, the operation was not repeat- 
ed for twenty years. In England it was 
first successfully performed in 1836. Here, 
as in America, under considerable violent 
opposition, operations within the last twen- 
ty years have multiplied rapidly, so that in 
1863, 377 cases had been reported, sixty per 
cent, of which had been successful. Iu 1870 
the number of operations performed in En- 
gland had increased to 1000 or 1100, more 
than 300 having been performed by one sur- 
geon. In France ovariotomy was first per- 
formed in 1844, and was successful. The 
operation was here denounced by distin- 
guished surgeons. In 1870 there had been 
reports of 190 operations, all but seven aft- 
er 1862, the percentage of success being less 
than in England and America. In Germany 
in 1870 there had been 180 operations, with 



IMPORTANT SURGICAL OPERATIONS. 



423 



a percentage of only forty-one per cent, of 
recoveries. 1 

I have cited the foregoing historical facts 
in order that the non-medical reader may to 
some extent appreciate the importance of 
this operation. That it has saved many 
lives can not he douhted ; and if in some 
instances life might not have heen destroy- 
ed hy the disease, the successful perform- 
ance of the operation has relieved patients 
from a distressing burden and deformity. 
Its origination, therefore, is one of the 
prominent events illustrative of American 
medical progress. When the large size of 
the ovarian tumors is considered, together 
with the nature of the operation — opening 
the abdomen by a long incision, and expos- 
ing the contained viscera — one can not but 
admire the boldness, self-confidence, and 
philanthropy which led to this great surgic- 
al achievement. 

Other important surgical operations were 
performed in this country for the first time 
not long after the operations of M'Dowell. 
Early in the past centennial period the 
great John Hunter introduced a new oper- 
ation for the cure of popliteal aneurism. 
Previously the operation had been opening 
the aneurismal sac, removal of the fibrinous 
or bloody clots contained within it, and ty- 
ing the artery above and below it — an op- 
eration attended with not a little risk of 
life from loss of blood and subsequent dan- 
gers, rendering it often unsuccessful. The 
Hunterian operation, as it was termed, con- 
sisted in tying the femoral artery at a dis- 
tance from the tumor, leaving the latter to 
diminish or disappear from the gradual ab- 
sorption of its contents. An account of 
this great improvement in surgery was first 
published in 1787. 

Hunter's operation opened up a new field 
in practical surgery, namely, the ligation of 
arteries of a still larger size, not only in cases 
of aneurism, but to arrest hemorrhages, and 
for the relief or cure of certain local affec- 
tions. Successive operations in this new 
field are among the most striking of the 
events denoting progress during the next 
thirty years. American surgeons took a 
prominent part in these operations. Aber- 
nethy tied the external iliac artery, in the 

1 For further details vide Peaelee, op. cit. 



groin, for aneurism in 1802. Stevens in San- 
ta Cruz and Atkinson in England had tied 
the internal iliac artery, the former with 
and the latter without success, when the 
operation was successfully performed by S. 
Pomeroy White, of Hudson, New York, in 
1827. In the same year Valentine Mott suc- 
cessfully tied the common iliac artery in a 
case of aneurism. This artery had been 
tied but once previously, and in that in- 
stance the operator was an American sur- 
geon, Gibson, then of Maryland, afterward 
of Philadelphia. In the latter case the op- 
eration was to arrest hemorrhage after a 
wound in the abdomen. The carotid artery 
on one side was first tied by Sir Astley 
Cooper in 1808. At that time probably no 
surgeon would have ventured to tie the 
common carotid artery on both sides. This 
was done in 1829, by Mussey, an American 
surgeon, twelve days intervening between 
the two operations. The disease was aneu- 
rism by anastomosis ; the aneurismal tumor 
was afterward removed, and the patient re- 
covered. 

Tying the subclavian artery above the 
collar-bone had been attempted by Sir Ast- 
ley Cooper, and the operation abandoned, 
in 1809. Subsequently the operation had 
been performed in Great Britain four times, 
but in each case without success, when it 
was for the first time successfully perform- 
ed by Wright Post, of New York, in 1817. 
In 1818 Valentiue Mott performed the diffi- 
cult and bold operation of tying the in- 
nominate artery. This operation, in the 
language of his biographer, Professor Gross, 
"gave him a world-wide reputation, and 
placed him in the very foremost rank of the 
illustrious surgeons of his day." To appre- 
ciate the operation, some knowledge of an- 
atomy and physiology is requisite. Suffice 
it to say that the innominate artery, situ- 
ated in " fearful proximity to the heart," is 
the vessel which distributes the blood to the 
right side of the head and the right upper 
extremity. Cutting off suddenly with a 
ligature the flow of blood through this ves- 
sel, the reliance for the circulation of blood 
in the parts just mentioned is upon the com- 
munications between its branches and those 
of other arteries. Appreciating the sense 
of responsibility which the surgeon must 
have felt in venturing on such an operation 



424 



MEDICAL AND SANITARY PROGRESS. 



for the first time, we can sympathize in the 
intense anxiety as thus described by his biog- 
rapher: " Doubtful whether so large a quan- 
tity of blood could suddenly be intercepted 
so near the heart without very serious ef- 
fects upon the brain, he drew the cord very 
gradually, with his eyes intently fixed upon 
the patient's countenance, determined to 
withdraw it instantly if any alarming symp- 
toms should arise. His feelings had been 
wrought to the highest pitch, and we may 
therefore easily imagine the relief he expe- 
rienced when he perceived, to use his own 
language, 'no change of feature or agita- 
tion of body.'" The operation was not suc- 
cessful, the patient dying from secondary 
hemorrhage twenty-two days after its per- 
formance ; the fact, however, that so large a 
vessel may be tied with impunity was dem- 
onstrated. The operation was afterward 
repeatedly performed, without success, ow- 
ing to the occurrence of hemorrhage. It 
was reserved for an American surgeon at 
length to perform it with complete success. 
In 1864 this artery was tied by A. W. Smyth, 
of New Orleans. Repeated hemorrhages 
having taken place, as in the other cases, 
Smyth, fifty-four days after the operation, 
tied another of the arteries carrying blood 
to the brain — the vertebral artery — and by 
this second operation the loss of blood was 
controlled. The patient recovered. 

I have referred to the tying of large ar- 
teries with some detail, because these suc- 
cessive operations represent important dis- 
coveries and improvements. It has been 
seen that with these operations the sur- 
geons of this country were in no small meas- 
ure identified. I do not refer to other great 
surgical operations performed by Mott and 
others, showing knowledge, skill, and bold- 
ness in the operations. It would be an in- 
justice to distinguished members of the 
profession to omit doing this were I writing 
a history of American medicine ; but the ob- 
ject of this sketch, it is to be borne in mind, 
is not to do honor to the individuals by 
whose attainments and labors the profession 
has been honored, but to cite representative 
facts as illustrative of progress. 

The next important event belonging in 
this series pertains to physiology, namely, 
the remarkable observations of Beaumont 
in relation to digestion. A Canadian boat- 



man, named Alexis San Martin, from an ac- 
cidental discharge of a musket loaded with 
buckshot, was wounded in the abdomen, and 
recovered with a permanent opening into the 
stomach. He was under the care of Beau- 
mont, a surgeon of the United States army, 
who at once recognized the opportunity of 
making important observations and experi- 
ments, the opening enabling him to with- 
draw the contents of the stomach at will 
without any injury to the patient. Prior 
to this time it had been ascertained that 
the processes of digestion in the stomach 
were dependent on the presence of a se- 
creted liquid — the gastric juice. Thisliquid, 
however, had never been obtained in so 
large quantity and in such a state of purity 
as was now practicable. Beaumont, secur- 
ing the co-operation of the patient, and 
keeping him daily under observation from 
the year 1825 to 1832, studied with great 
patience and ability the character of this 
liquid when withdrawn from the stomach, 
and the successive changes taking place in 
the aliment during digestion. The effects 
of the gastric juice upon different kinds of 
nutriment out of the body were carefully 
observed ; the relative digestibility of the 
various articles of food within the stomach 
was accurately determined, and the effects 
of disturbing extrinsic influences were noted. 
Beaumont published an account of his ex- 
periments and observations in 1834. This 
event was one of great importance in the 
progress of physiology. The facts contain- 
ed in his publication at this day are to be 
found in the physiological text-books of all 
countries. Within late years experimental 
physiologists have been accustomed to pro- 
duce, in inferior animals, especially in the 
dog, an artificial communication with the 
interior of the stomach such as was occa- 
sioned by accident in the case of the Cana- 
dian boatman, in order to obtain the gastric 
juice, and to demonstrate its effect upon 
food both within and without the organ. 
It is obvious, however, that the results of 
these experiments and observations could 
not be considered as representing, in all re- 
gards, facts pertaining to digestion in man, 
and hence, as furnishing a standard for com- 
parison, those made by Beaumont are in- 
valuable. 

I come now to the crowning event in the 



ANESTHESIA. 



425 



history of American medical and sanitary 
progress during the last centennial period. 
If it he admitted that every thing pertain- 
ing to the physical universe and to living 
heings is in conformity with an infinitely 
intelligent and wise government, diseases 
exist for certain purposes, and the means 
of preventing, controlling, and ameliorating 
them acquired hy human knowledge are not 
left to chance. The history of medical and 
sanitary progress in the past shows that 
epochs characterized hy great discoveries 
do not occur in rapid succession. Jenner's 
discovery at the end of the last century con- 
stituted a great epoch. The discovery of 
the useful application of anaesthetics may 
he considered as constituting the second 
great epoch within the last centennial pe- 
riod. Had it been announced a century 
ago that ere long surgical operations were 
to be divested of suffering, that the law of 
distress in child-birth imposed upou woman 
in the primeval curse was to be abrogated, 
and tbat pain need no longer be an element 
in many diseases, would not such an an- 
nouncement have seemed as marvelous, to 
say the least, as that, by means of steam, 
the Atlantic Ocean might be traversed in 
less than ten days, the American continent 
in a still less number of days, and that, 
through the agency of the electrical cur- 
rent, a communication could be sent around 
the globe in the space of a few minutes ? 

The successful application of anaesthesia 
by the inhalation of ether, or etherization 
in surgery, was first demonstrated in Boston, 
in 1846. The first application in operative 
midwifery was also made in Boston, in 1847. 
Chloroform, which was speedily to a con- 
siderable extent substituted for sulphuric 
ether as the anaesthetic agent, was intro- 
duced by Simpson, of Edinburgh, shortly 
after the discovery of etherization. It is 
needless to dilate on the inestimable boon 
which anaesthesia, in its various useful ap- 
plications, has conferred on mankind. The 
annihilation of pain was so obviously such 
a great blessing that almost the only ques- 
tions ever raised in opposition have relat- 
ed to the impossibility of absolute security 
against the occasional loss of life from the 
anaesthetic agent. Of the two anaesthetic 
agents, ether and chloroform, the latter has 
been generally employed in Europe, and 



also to a considerable extent m this coun- 
try. A combination of the two agents is 
sometimes employed. The danger to life is 
undoubtedly greater from chloroform than 
from ether, but the administration of the 
latter is more difficult, and the inhalation 
is often disagreeable : these are the reasons 
for the preference given so largely to the 
former. The danger from ether is almost 
nil, and that from chloroform is exceeding- 
ly small. Thus, at Guy's Hospital, Loudon, 
chloroform had been used in more than 
12,000 cases before any serious accident oc- 
curred, and in the Crimean war it was ad- 
ministered more than 25,000 times without 
a single death. 1 

It is difficult to appreciate blessings with- 
out taking as a stand-point a period when 
they were not enjoyed. Events with which 
we become familiar cease after a time to ex- 
cite wonder or admiration ; and when the 
mind becomes accustomed to extraordinary 
acquisitions, they seem to have come as a 
matter of course. If we go back to the 
time when severe, tedious surgical opera- 
tions were performed without anaesthesia, 
recalling the prolonged agony of the suffer- 
er, the strongest endurance tasked to the 
utmost, the patient sometimes requiring to 
be forcibly restrained by powerful assist- 
ants, or confined by straps to the operating 
table, one can form an adequate estimate 
of the precious discovery of a prompt, effi- 
cient, and safe method of annihilating pain. 
Contrast with the picture just presented 
the severest of operations at the present 
day, the patient falling easily and quickly 
into a quiet sleep, and awakening to find, 
to his astonishment, that all is over! This 
contrast might be^ extended to cases of se- 
vere, protracted confinements, and also to 
certain diseases characterized by intense 
suffering. But the advantages of anaesthe- 
sia are not limited to the relief of suffering. 
The annihilation of pain often contributes 
to recovery ; for the shock and exhaustion 
caused by pain may do much toward an un- 
favorable termination after surgical opera- 
tions, or in cases of confinement and disease, 
and may even be the immediate cause of 
death. Anaesthesia thus has been the means 
of the saving of human life. Moreover, it 

» Gross's System of Surgery. 



426 



MEDICAL AND SANITARY PROGRESS. 



has had this effect in another mode. Pa- 
tients heretofore sometimes preferred death 
to the terrible trial of painful operations 
which now have no terrors. There is still 
another application in which anaesthesia is 
of incalculable benefit. It enables the sur- 
geon or physician to make careful and thor- 
ough examinations after injuries, and to ex- 
plore by appropriate means interual parts, 
the requisite manipulations heretofore caus- 
ing so much suffering that they were there- 
by impracticable or hazardous. 

It would be pleasant to connect the dis- 
covery of the useful applications of anaes- 
thesia with the name of a discoverer hold- 
ing a position as a benefactor of mankind 
like that of Jenner. While we claim for 
our country the honor of the discovery, the 
circumstances connected with it are not in 
all respects agreeable or creditable. The 
merit of the discovery seems due to the late 
Horace Wells, a practicing dentist in Hart- 
ford, Connecticut. He first made the appli- 
cation to himself, inhaling the nitrous oxide 
gas, and having a tooth extracted while in- 
sensible from this anaesthetic. Afterward 
he employed this agent for the same pur- 
pose in several instances. He attempted to 
bring the matter before the profession by a 
public demonstration at the medical college 
in Boston, but his experiments not proving 
successful on that occasion, he met with rid- 
icule instead of encouragement. Driven to 
despondency and insanity, he subsequently 
committed suicide. His successful applica- 
tions of the nitrous oxide gas were made in 
1844. Morton, a dentist in Boston, who had 
been a pupil of Wells, subsequently made 
experiments upon himself and others, using 
as the anaesthetic agent sulphuric ether. In 
the selection of this agent and in the man- 
ner of using it he was guided by C. T. Jack- 
son, a distinguished chemist in Boston. It 
was by Morton's solicitation that John C. 
Warren was induced to perform, at the 
Massachusetts General Hospital, au opera- 
tion for the removal of a tumor of the neck 
on a patient rendered insensible by the in- 
halation of ether. The auaesthesia in this 
instance was not complete, but the suffer- 
ing from the operation was evidently dimin- 
ished. On the following day an operation 
was performed by George I lay ward on a pa- 
tient etherized by Morton and rendered en- 



tirely insensible. This was the first com- 
pletely successful application to a surgical 
operation, exclusive of the previous experi- 
ments for the extraction of teeth. From 
that date the employment of anaesthesia 
rapidly extended. To Morton is due the 
credit of accomplishing the practical appli- 
cation of anaesthesia to surgical operations, 
but he probably derived the idea from his 
preceptor, Wells. Jackson suggested ether 
in place of the nitrous oxide gas, and aided 
Morton by his chemical knowledge. Un- 
happily Morton and Jackson were led to 
declare the anaesthetic agent a compound 
which they kept a secret, calling it letheon, 
and obtaining a patent for it as a joint dis- 
covery. Such a procedure is in violation 
of medical ethics, and was in no wise cred- 
itable. Afterward each claimed to be the 
discoverer. These circumstances, together 
with the conflicting statements and acrimo- 
nious discussions which followed, are pain- 
ful to think of in connection with a discov- 
ery Avhich has rendered such great service 
to mankind. 

In referring to the extraction of teeth in 
connection with anaesthesia, I have not con- 
sidered this in the light of a surgical oper- 
ation, but inasmuch as most persons have 
had more or less practical acquaintance with 
it, to describe the paiufulness of the process 
were superfluous. It is worthy of note that 
the inhalation of the nitrous oxide gas, the 
anaesthetic agent with which Wells experi- 
mented, is now largely used to render pain- 
less the extraction of teeth. The anaesthe- 
sia induced thereby is not sufficiently lasting 
for most surgical operations, but it answers 
for this purpose ; and thus far, having been 
administered many thousand times, it has 
not been followed by any serious conse- 
quences. In this regard the dentist's chair 
is now deprived of all its terrors : after a 
moment of pleasant dreams, its occupants 
awaken to find the offending members gone. 

Passing from the foregoing brief account 
of the more notable of the discoveries and 
improvements exemplifying medical and 
sanitary progress, I must be satisfied with 
a cursory notice of some of those of lesser 
importance, belonging, for the most part, to 
the history of the last forty years. I desire 
to premise distinctly that I by no means un- 
dertake to include in the following list all, 



IMPROVEMENTS IN SURGERY. 



427 



or even the greater part, of the minor con- 
tributions which have been made during this 
period to the science and art of medicine — 
using the term medicine here, as hitherto, in 
its comprehensive sense, which embraces ev- 
ery thing relating directly or indirectly to 
surgery and obstetrics, as well as to the 
study of the human organism in health and 
in disease. My object is simply, as already 
noted, to cite illustrations of the co-opera- 
tion of our country in medical progress, and 
the facts cited are those which suggest them- 
selves in my own retrospection. 

The substitution of simple manual efforts 
for pulleys and other mechanical appliances 
in the reduction of dislocations of the hip 
joint is an American improvement. It had 
been taught by Nathan Smitt and practiced 
by Physic, but for its complete exposition 
and popularization the profession is indebt- 
ed to the late W. W. Reid, of Rochester, New 
York. By means of the improvement, quot- 
ing the words of an eminent surgeon, "the 
reduction of this dislocation is no longer, as 
it once was, the dread of the surgeon and 
the terror of the patient." Reid published 
his experiments and observations in 1851. 

In 1848 Guidon Buck reported a series of 
cases in which the rare and fatal affection 
known as oedema of the glottis had been 
successfully treated by scarifications of the 
glottis and epiglottis. This affection in some 
instances destroys life very suddenly, and 
the only resource is in prompt surgical in- 
terference. Buck's simple operation was a 
substitute for opening the larynx, or laryn- 
gotomy. The operation was original with 
him, although it was afterward ascertained 
that it had been performed by Lisfranc, of 
Paris, but without having attracted atten- 
tion. 

In 1850 H. I. Bowditch resorted to punc- 
ture with a small-sized instrument and the 
employment of suction for the purpose of 
withdrawing morbid liquids from the ches1>. 
He subsequently employed this method in 
cases of pleurisy in a very large number of 
cases, and also applied it to the removal of 
purulent liquid in other situations. The 
method has been since employed by others 
in this country and in Europe with great 
success. Latterly, under the name of aspi- 
ration, it has become popularized, and it is 
one of the most important of the improve- 



ments in practical medicine within the last 
quarter of a century. 

In 1846 Horace Green published a work 
on diseases of the air passages, in which he 
asserted that it was practicable to introduce 
an instrument through the mouth into the 
larynx, and in this way to make topical ap- 
plications in the treatment of diseases here 
seated. The assertion was at first received 
with much incredulity and distrust, the fea- 
sibility of the operation being by many de- 
nied. On this point, however, at the pres- 
ent time few, if any, are skeptical. 

In 1848 Jonathan Knight, of New Haven, 
Connecticut, reported the first successful 
case in which recovery from aneurism was 
effected by means of digital compression — a 
method of treatment which has since been 
resorted to successfully in a considerable 
number of cases. 

Of American surgeons now living or re- 
cently deceased a considerable number have 
rendered valuable service by either origina- 
ting or modifying operations, and by con- 
tributious to surgical literature. In this 
list are Gross, who most appropriately heads 
it, and whose voluminous writings are held 
in the highest estimation not only in this 
country but abroad ; Hamilton, whose trea- 
tise on fractures and dislocations is recog- 
nized as a standard work in all countries ; 
Sayre, whose original operations on diseases 
of joints and ingenious improvements in or- 
thopaedic surgery have secured for him 
transatlantic honors ; Brainard, John C. 
Warren, his son, J. Mason Warren, George 
Hay ward, Henry I. Bigelow, James R.Wood, 
Van Buren, Parker, Markoe, Eve, Moore, and 
many others whose names would not be 
omitted in a full history of the progress of 
American surgery. To all justice will doubt- 
less be done in papers to be presented at the 
Centennial International Medical Congress 
to be held in Philadelphia in September 
next. 

Important improvements in certain oper- 
ations for the treatment of the accidents 
incident to confinement and the diseases of 
women have been contributed within the 
last quarter of a century by J. Marion Sims, 
James P. White, T.G. Thomas, Emmet, Peas- 
lee, Barker, and others whose names are 
identified with the literature of this depart- 
ment of medicine. To notice these contri- 



428 



MEDICAL AND SANITARY PROGRESS. 



butions more specifically would in this arti- 
cle be out of place. 

The foregoing improvements relate to 
practical surgery, and, for obvious reasons, 
they are more easily characterized than 
those relating to the remedial or other meas- 
ures of treatment in cases of disease. An 
improvement pertaining to the physical di- 
agnosis of the diseases of the chest may be 
mentioned, namely, the binaural stethoscope 
invented by Canmann in 1854. The advan- 
tages of this acoustic instrument in the prac- 
tice of auscultation are such that, unless it 
be superseded by further improvements, it 
must take the place of the various stetho- 
scopes devised since the time of Laenuec. 

Let it not be inferred, from the omission 
to specify original views and improvements 
relating to the treatment of diseases, that 
progress in the latter within late years has 
been less marked than in surgery. The 
writings and oral teachings of such men as 
James Jackson, John Ware, Bowditch, and 
Shattuck, of Boston ; George B. Wood, Dick- 
son, StilbS, J. R. Mitchell, Da Costa, and La 
Roche, of Philadelphia ; Davis and Allen, of 
Chicago ; Elisha Bartlett, Swett, and Alonzo 
Clark, of New York ; and Daniel Drake, of 
Ohio, have rendered the science and art of 
medicine in this country steadily progress- 
ive. In this connection reference should be 
made to a discourse, published in 1835, "on 
self-limited diseases," by Jacob Bigelow, of 
Boston, which led physicians in this country 
to recognize more fully than before the im- 
portant fact that many diseases tend intrin- 
sically to recovery, and to appreciate the 
importance of the study of the natural his- 
tory of diseases. 

Important contributions to the materia 
mi dica have not been wanting. As long ago 
as 1807 the remedy known as ergot was 
brought to the notice of the profession by 
Dr. Stearns, and named by him pulvis partu- 
riens, a term expressive of its peculiar oper- 
ation in cases of confinement. Its potency 
in the application denoted by this term has 
since been every where recognized, and of 
late it has been found to have a much wider 
range of usefulness, being now regarded by 
many as possessing much efficiency in ar- 
resting hemorrhages in different situations. 
The \ eratruni viride was employed as a med- 
icine by Tully, ( )sgood. and other physicians 



in New England as far back as 1835 ; but it 
was brought forward more recently (1850) 
as a remedy of great power in producing a 
sedative operation on the heart, by Nor- 
wood, of South Carolina. The lobelia, or 
Indian tobacco, is also an American remedy, 
introduced to the notice of the profession by 
the Rev. Dr. Cutter, of Massachusetts, for 
the relief of asthma, and afterward much 
used as a palliative in that disease both 
here and abroad. The use of the anthel- 
mintic remedy, chenopodium or worm-seed, 
originated in Virginia in the early part of 
the present century. The anaesthetic agent, 
chloroform, so extensively used since its 
employment by Sirnpson in 1848, was dis- 
covered by Guthrie, of Sackett's Harbor, 
New York, at about the same time that it 
was also discovered by Soubeirau, at Paris, 
in 1831. 

The medical history of our country with- 
in the last quarter of a century is not alto- 
gether barren in contributions to anatomy 
and physiology, albeit the tendency to stud- 
ies having a direct and obvious practical 
bearing is predominant. The researches of 
Isaacs in relation to the structure of the 
kidneys were characterized by great minute- 
ness, completeness, and accuracy. They have 
been so considered and adopted in Europe 
as well as in America. Brown-Sequard, al- 
though not a native of this country, is of 
American paternity, his father having been 
born in Philadelphia. Moreover, a consid- 
erable part of his anatomical, physiological, 
and pathological labors have been prose- 
cuted and the results originally published 
here. He has contributed largely toward 
our knowledge of the structure, functions, 
and morbid conditions of the nervous sys- 
tem ; also important facts relating to other 
organs and functions of the body. Bennett 
Douler, of New Orleans, had made valuable 
contributions to our knowledge of the tem- 
perature of the body in anticipation of re- 
cent researches in that direction, and he has 
also made interesting contributions to the 
study of the nervous system. John C. Dal- 
ton has published original and valuable ob- 
servations relating to the nervous system, 
digestion, the functious of glands, and oth- 
er physiological subjects. To him is due 
the credit of the introduction of vivisec- 
tions into physiological teaching, which im- 



CHANGES IN PRACTICE. 



429 



portant mode of illustration is probably 
practiced in certain of our medical schools 
more largely than in those of Europe. S. 
Weir Mitchell has developed important facts 
in relation to the nervous system. Austin 
Flint, Jim., has contributed new views re- 
specting circulation and respiration, togeth- 
er with experimental researches relating to 
a new function of the liver. The latter re- 
ceived honorable mention by the French 
Academy of Sciences, with a recompense of 
1500 francs. Brown -S6quard, Dalton, and 
Flint junior have contributed largely to 
physiological literature. 

It remains to consider briefly medical and 
sanitary progress as exemplified by muta- 
tions in the practice of medicine. It is a 
curious fact that, according to a wide-spread 
popular belief, physicians of the present day 
hold strictly to doctrines handed down by 
Hippoci-ates, Galen, and others of the early 
fathers in medicine. These ancient doc- 
trines, it is by many supposed, have with 
the medical profession somewhat of the force 
exerted by theological dogmas on their ad- 
herents. The practice of medicine is thought 
to embrace a binding creed, from which phy- 
sicians are expected not to swerve under the 
penalty of being repudiated by their breth- 
ren. Hence it is common to speak of a med- 
ical man as belonging to the " old school." 
I say this is a curious fact, for quite the re- 
verse is the truth. The past history of med- 
icine shows a series of mutations in its prin- 
ciples and practice. It is far more open to 
attack on the score of successive changes 
than of fixedness. The illegitimate systems 
which from time to time have sprung up are 
distinguished by being based on particular 
dogmas. Their followei-s are truly secta- 
rians. There is no other standaixl for med- 
ical orthodoxy than the opinions held by 
the reputable physicians and inculcated in 
the accredited woi'ks. As regards individ- 
ual opinions and modes of practice, so long 
as they are not maintained in a sectarian 
spirit nor adopted for unworthy ends, there 
are no restrictions in the way of profession- 
al fellowship. The views of a physician, 
theoretical or practical, may be never so 
eccentric or absurd without interference 
with his fraternal relations, provided he 
conforms to the established principles of 
medical ethics, and does not place himself 



in an attitude of antagonism toward the 
honor and dignity of the profession. 

A comparison of the early and latter part 
of the last centennial period furnishes many 
striking points of contrast. Of course it 
can not be expected in this paper to go into 
details ; I must confine myself to leading 
characteristics. A very marked contrast re- 
lates to the use of certain potential meas- 
ures of treatment, such as blood-letting, ca- 
thartics, emetics, blisters, or other methods 
of counter-irritation, the use of mercurial 
remedies, etc. Comparatively these are but 
little employed at the present time. This 
therapeutical change is by no means proof 
that these measures are not useful. Their 
usefulness has heretofore undoubtedly in 
many instances been overestimated, and it is 
not improbable that further progress in med- 
ical experience will show that they are now 
underestimated. One reason for their being 
used with more circumspection and reserve 
is, the ends for which they were employed, 
owing to improvements in materia medico, 
and pharmacy, are now accomplished by 
remedies which involve less repugnance on 
the part of the patient, aud which are less 
liable to do harm if injudiciously employed. 
In this point of view, therefore, the change 
denotes progress in knowledge. Perhaps 
nowhere more than in this country is the 
practice of medicine characterized by the 
change just adverted to. 

Potential drugs of all kinds are less used 
now than heretofore. This is due in a meas- 
ure to a better knowledge than formerly 
of their operation, acquired by accumulated 
clinical experience and experiments on the 
lower animals. But it is in a great measure 
attributable to the results of the study with- 
in late years of the natural history of dis- 
eases. This term embraces the laws regu- 
lating the termination, the duration, the 
phenomena, and the complications of dis- 
eases, irrespective of the operation of active 
measures of treatment. The importance of 
this study has been for the past half century 
more appreciated than formerly. As oppor- 
tunities have offered, it has been prosecuted 
with much zeal and patience. Physicians 
in this couutry have taken not an insignifi- 
cant part in the prosecution of this study. 
The results have shown that many diseases 
are self-limited in duration, and pursue a 



430 



MEDICAL AND SANITARY PROGRESS. 



favorable course -without active medicinal 
interference, and, as a consequence, there is 
a greater reserve now than heretofore in the 
use of potential drugs. And in proportion 
to this reserve a greater importance has 
been attached to what may be distinguished 
as sanitary measures of treatment, such as 
ventilation, regulation of temperature, etc. 
It is undoubtedly true that many diseases 
are more successfully managed on account 
of these changes. In the dietetic manage- 
ment of the sick there has been great im- 
provement. The recognition of the impor- 
tance of supporting the powers of life by an 
adequate alimentation, together with the 
judicious use of alcoholic stimulants, is one 
of the striking characteristics of progress in 
the practice of medicine during the last half 
century. In all these mutations indicative 
of progress, it may be claimed, in behalf of 
the medical profession of this country, that 
they have not been backward in conforming 
to them nor in promoting them. The Amer- 
ican medical mind may be said to be emi- 
nently cosmopolitan and eclectic. With 
perhaps some undue readiness in accepting 
oi)inions emanating from abroad, the pre- 
vailing disposition is to seek every where 
for new developments of knowledge, espe- 
cially in the practical departments of med- 
icine. In this country, as elsewhere, one 
point of contrast between the present and 
the past is the diminished power of indi- 
vidual authority in medical doctrines. At 
this day, much less than in former times, 
is the phrase, Jurare in verba magistri, appli- 
cable to the medical profession. 

In the preparation of remedies there is a 
notable contrast between the earlier and 
later portions of the last centennial period. 
The improvements in pharmacy have been 
very great. Concentrated forms of medi- 
cine have largely supplanted infusions or 
decoctions and bulky medicinal substances. 
The discovery of the alkaloid quinia was in 
1820. Previously malarial fevers were treat- 
ed with the powdered cinchona bark, the 
quantity requisite for a cure being so large 
that, on this account, the treatment was 
very often unsuccessful. Let it be consid- 
ered that pounds of the bark are represent- 
ed by a few grains of the alkaloid. Quinia 
was speedily after its discovery in use in 
America, where malarial fevers were a great 



obstacle in the way of the settlement of 
our vast national domain. As early as 1841 
it had been employed in doses which had 
not been ventured upon in Europe, but 
which since that time have been found es- 
sential to secure its full remedial power, 
not only in malarial fevers, but in other dis- 
eases. The experience in our country did 
much toward developing knowledge re- 
specting the curative power of this great 
autiperiodic remedy. 

In the manufacture and employment of 
other isolated medicinal principles from veg- 
etable remedies, and of extracts, the phar- 
maceutists and physicians in this country 
have not been far behind those of Europe. 
To appreciate the progress in this regard, 
from the stand-point of the patient, one 
must be able to recall the time when the 
nauseousness of physic could not fail to 
tempt many to throw it to the dogs. 
Thanks to pharmaceutical improvements, 
doses of medicine are now rarely disagree- 
able, and not unfrequently they are even 
rendered palatable. 

Passing from this brief reference to mu- 
tations in practice to the character of the 
medical profession, as represented by the 
average of the professional attainments, to- 
gether with the intellectual and moral quali- 
fications of its members, it is needless to say 
that the progress has been marked. In 
these respects the medical profession in the 
United States to-day will compare favora- 
bly with the profession in any part of the 
world. This may be asserted without pre- 
sumption. It would be easy to cite the tes- 
timony to that effect of competent observers 
from abroad who have been among us. No- 
where in civilized countries do medical men 
hold a higher social position than here. No- 
where, as a class, do they exert a stronger 
influence upon other members of society. 
In our democratic form of government no 
body of men are more influential. Were 
the physicians of any of the States in the 
Union to combine together to form a polit- 
ical party, their power would be irresisti- 
ble. With such a combination, the election 
of officers and law-makers would be under 
their control. Fortunately, or unfortunate- 
ly, this is not likely to happen, for, as a rule, 
physicians are not inclined to take an active 
part in politics. By those who might dep- 



ANTICIPATIONS. 



431 



recate a political party composed of doc- 
tors it will doubtless be said, such a uuion 
is rendered impossible by their proverbial 
tendency to disagree. The disagreement 
of doctors has long been a proverb. They 
are considered fair game for jests in this re- 
gard. Were the charge made in earnest, it 
would be out of place in this article to un- 
dertake to refute it. Of the three profes- 
sions, the imputation, even in jest, would 
hardly come with a good grace from the 
clergy. Our legal friends are sometimes 
fond of comparing, in this point of view, 
the medical profession with their own. If 
any of these should honor this article by a 
perusal, I am sure they will not take offense 
if I introduce an anecdote which, as I hope, 
will not be considered frivolous or out of 
taste iu treating of so sober a subject as 
medical and sanitary progress. The anec- 
dote was told by an eminent member of the 
bar in Connecticut, who was a party in the 
colloquy, and who related it, by-the-way, 
as evidence that a talent for humor which 
formerly was possessed by not a few physi- 
cians had nearly become extinct, the pro- 
fession in this respect having retrograded 
rather than advanced. This distinguished 
lawyer, meeting one day an old physician 
of the humoristical school, in order to elicit 
a witty rejoinder attacked him ou the score 
of the disagreement of doctors, referring, in 
contrast, to the habitual agreement of law- 
yers, no matter how violently they opposed 
each other in their professional antagonism. 
He asked his friend the doctor to explain 
this contrast. " Oh," said the doctor, " Mil- 
ton has given the explanation of the differ- 
ence between us in this respect in the fol- 
lowing quotation : 

" ' Devils with devils damn'd firm concord hold ; 
Men only disagree.' " 

The proper scope of this article takes in 
only the past ; but anticipations naturally 
follow retrospections. After a review of 
the progress made during the last hundred 
years, one can hardly forbear to ask, what 
will have taken place at the end of the next 
centennial period ? A few thoughts sug- 
gested by this question may be permitted in 
concluding the article. It is quite certain 
that medical and sanitary progress will con- 
tinue. This is a fair inference from the 



continued progress hitherto up to this time. 
It is also a logical conclusion, from the facts 
in the past history of medicine, that future 
progress iu this direction will be by slow 
advances. As it has been heretofore, so it 
will be hereafter : great discoveries or im- 
provements will not follow in rapid succes- 
sion. The great event in the seventeenth 
century was the discovery of the circulation 
of the blood, in the eighteenth century the 
discovery of vaccination, and in the present 
century the discovery of anaesthesia. Events 
like these are not to be expected to recur at 
much shorter intervals. What is to be the 
next great event ? It would, of course, be 
absurd to attempt to answer this inquiry. 
Sometimes, however, preliminary circum- 
stances, as we can see afterward, have point- 
ed distinctly to the direction in which a 
great discovery was to be looked for. If I 
were to indulge a prophetic fancy, it would 
lead me to predict that, ere long, the nature 
of what are called the special or specific 
causes of disease will be demonstrated. By 
special causes I mean those which produce 
certain diseases, such as the continued, the 
periodical, and the eruptive fevers. That 
these and some other diseases have each 
its own special cause, never occurring with- 
out the action of its own cause, and the 
latter producing only that particular dis- 
ease, is rationally almost certain. We are 
acquainted with many of the conditions un- 
der which these causes are developed, and 
we know many of the laws of their opera- 
tion ; but their nature has not been ascer- 
tained. It is easy to imagine that were 
these causes fully known, a great impetus 
would be given to the progress of medicine. 
The discovery of the nature of one special 
cause would probably lead, by analogy, to a 
similar knowledge of the other causes. It 
may reasonably be supposed that the knowl- 
edge of their essential nature would lead to 
the means of destroying them, or of neutral- 
izing their morbific operation, and iu this 
way the most destructive to human life of 
the acute diseases would be prevented or 
arrested. Many circumstances combine to 
render it probable that these special causes 
are either vegetable or animal organisms. 
On these circumstances are based the " germ 
theory" of disease. It is, indeed, claimed 
by some that the causation of certain dis- 



432 



MEDICAL AND SANITARY PROGRESS. 



eases by specific organisms of microscopical 
minuteness lias been demonstrated ; by 'the 
majority of medical thinkers, however, the 
demonstrative evidence is not considered as 
complete. It is an interesting fact that a 
quarter of a century ago the cryptogamic 
origin of many diseases was advocated with 
cogent evidence and argument by a distin- 
guished medical teacher in this country — 
the late J. R. Mitchell. 

Judging from the past, the future prog- 
ress of medicine will involve improvements 
of and additions to the means of investiga- 
ting the body in health and disease. With- 
in the present century the different organs 
were resolved into their component tissues 
by differences mainly in sensible properties. 
In this way Bichat created the department 
of general anatomy, that is, the description 
of the elementary tissues into which the or- 
gans are resolvable. Next came the appli- 
cation of analytical chemistry to the study 
of the solids and fluids, by means of which 
the department of general anatomy was ex- 
tended. Then followed the employment of 
the microscope, giving rise to a new prov- 
ince in anatomy and pathology, namely, his- 
tology. Meanwhile the investigation of the 
heart and lungs by means of the conduction 
of sounds engaged attention, and ausculta- 
tion became a branch of medicine. Still 
later the exploration of the interior of the 
eye and of the air passages by means of 
optical instruments has given rise to oph- 
thalmoscopy and laryngoscopy. To these 
might be added numerous improved meth- 
ods of examining internal parts by manual 
instruments. 

The improved and added means of inves- 
tigation which are in the future can not be 
foreseen, but it may be hoped that thereby, 
before the lapse of another hundred years, 
will be gained an insight into the molecu- 
lar processes involved in nutrition, secre- 
tion, and excretion. At present our knowl- 
edge of these processes is limited to the 
conditions under which they take, place, 
with certain of their laws and their effects. 
In proportion as they are more fully under- 
stood, the processes involved in inflamma- 
tion, the various morbid alterations of struc- 
ture, and the disorders of glandular organs 
may be expected to be better comprehend- 
ed, contributing, moreover, to the progress 



of therapeutics as well as of pathology, and 
changing materially the principles and prac- 
tice of medicine. 

If, as regards new remedies and improve- 
ments in pharmacy, progress continue as it 
has taken place in the past, the present may 
very imperfectly represent the future treat- 
ment of diseases. It is but a little over 
half a century since the great antiperiodic 
remedy, quinia, was discovered. It is not 
improbable that before the end of another 
half century a remedy, or remedies, may be 
discovered which will arrest other fevers or 
acute inflammatory affections as quinia ar- 
rests malarial diseases. If such an event 
take place, how great will be the change 
in practical medicine! New modes of in- 
troducing remedies into the system may be 
ascertained more effective than the recently 
employed method of injecting medicated so- 
lutions beneath the skin. 

The extent to which abnormal conditions 
of the mind are dependent on morbid states 
of the body is hardly yet fully recognized, 
though it has been the subject of much 
thought. Mental disorders falling short of 
insanity have hitherto entered too little 
into pathological study. The time may 
come when, with a better knowledge of the 
mutual relations of the mental and vital 
functions, disorders of the former, now in a 
great measure left for "the patient to min- 
ister to himself," will be prevented or suc- 
cessfully treated, and the development of 
insanity thereby often forestalled. With 
future progress in this direction, it may be 
that not a little of the abnormities and enor- 
mities which the law considers and punishes 
as crimes will be recognized as more proper- 
ly belonging to pathology, claiming the ju- 
dicious management of the physician rather 
than judicial treatment. 

Finally, the spirit of imaginary foresight 
which has led to the few foregoing thoughts 
suggests the question, how will the coming 
physician differ from the physician of to- 
day? The question gives rise to a train 
of speculation which it would be pleasant 
enough on the part of the writer to pursue; 
but this I must forego. Suffice it to say 
that the coming physician will not be re- 
garded even as much as now in the light of 
a mere prescribe!* of drugs. I would by no 
means be thought to underrate the impor- 



PREVENTION OF DISEASE. 



433 



tauce of this function. Diseases will al- 
ways claim medicinal treatment, and doubt- 
less medicines will be prescribed a hundred 
years hence with more efficacy than in the 
present stage of medical progress. But the 
coming physician will be regarded in a high- 
er point of view, as one on whose judgment 
people will be content to rely in the inter- 
diction as well as in the prescribing of drugs. 
It will be more and more considered that 
one of the most important of his profession- 
al functions is to determine, by skilled in- 
terrogation of the different organs of the 
body, their freedom from disease, as well as, 
on the other hand, to detect accurately and 
early deviations from health. He will hiin- 
28 



self appreciate more and more the fact that 
prophylaxis — the prevention of disease — is 
a higher and more useful branch of medicine 
than therapeutics. The prevention of crime 
and the proper treatment of criminals will 
be recognized as embraced within the scope 
of medical knowledge and practice. His of- 
fices as a hygienic adviser in matters per- 
taining to mind and body will become equal, 
if not superior, to his duties as a therapeu- 
tist ; and the future enlightened lawgiver, 
with " others in authority," will co-operate 
in devising and carrying out measures for 
medical education, the promotion of med- 
ical knowledge, and those having reference 
to public health. 



XV. 

AMERICAN JURISPRUDENCE. 



THE story is told that a company of set- 
tlers in a New England colony initiated 
their acts of organized legislation by pass- 
ing the resolve, " That this colony be gov- 
erned by the laws of God in the Old Testa- 
ment until we have time to prepare better." 
In this we discern four tones : key-note — 
a reverent recognition of Divine authority 
iinderlying human law ; third — a conserva- 
tive willingness to obey for the present the 
existing law ; fifth — a progressive confidence 
in ability to improve the forms and modes 
of law as the growth of affairs requires ; oc- 
tave — a resolute purpose to make that im- 
provement in due season. These four tones 
have formed the common chord of Ameri- 
can jurisprudence. In the brief, faint echo 
which this article will bring to the ear of 
1876, one may perceive that this harmony 
constantly recurs. 

THE AMERICAN LIBRABY OF LAW. 
To indicate the impossibility of stating 
details in this article, let us take at the 
outset a topic which otherwise might well 
stand for the close — the collection of books 
embodying the law. A glance at these, in 
their number and complexity, will show the 
magnitude and elaboration of the field of 
thought which they include. Jurisprudence 
even within a single jurisdiction is too mi- 
nute in its distinctions, its lines are too un- 
yielding, its angles are too sharp, and its 
growth is too wayward, to admit of repro- 
ducing its history in an epitome which shall 
be both brief and accurate. In our country 
such difficulty is increased by the consider- 
ation that the law in all its details differs 
exceedingly in the different States. A his- 
tory of the rights of married women in New 
York could have no application to Tennes- 
see. A sketch, even very general, of modes 
of judicial procedure in Illinois would be 
altogether untrue for Indiana. The legal 
history and policy of Louisiana differ essen- 
tially from those of Massachusetts. Hence 
in matters of law it is not possible to give 
concise, simple answers, which shall be accu- 



rate, to even the simplest questions. What 
is the lawful rate of interest ? One must give 
a dozen different rules to represent the dif- 
ferent States. " Six per cent, in such and 
such States, seven in others, again ten, and 
elsewhere it is left to private contract." 
What is murder, and hoiv is it punished ? An 
essay giving the pith of the statutes on this 
topic, and the rules and distinctions estab- 
lished by the courts, necessary to a correct 
answer for the different States, though it 
excluded all legal verbiage and narratives 
of particular trials, would overrun the rea- 
sonable length of an article. 

Was there once a photographer who en- 
deavored to take the surface of the whole 
United States in one picture ? or a composer 
who tried to bring all varieties of music 
within one orchestral piece ? Did they 
succeed? No. Then this writer will not 
attempt to portray details in this sketch 
of the development of jurisprudence. 

Imagine, then, that we see arranged be- 
fore us the printed books which comprise 
the law as it has grown throughout the 
United States during the century, being 
such a collection as many societies and 
some few individual lawyers have really 
made ; only these actual libraries include 
numerous English and some Contiuental 
works, while our imaginary shelves hold 
works of American origin alone. 

These books, by-the-way, are, as a mass, 
the product of this century. There exist a 
few volumes of decisions rendered previous 
to the Revolution ; but as to most of these, 
the books were published since, though the 
decisions were rendered before. There are 
rare old volumes of colonial statutes, pub- 
lished in colonial days ; but they have be- 
come reduced almost to the rank of curiosi- 
ties or paper-stock by repeals or revisions 
of the laws. With trivial exceptions, the 
American library of law is the growth and 
fruit of this last one hundred years. 

First in practical importance come the 
"Reports." These contain the official ac- 
counts of what the various courts have de- 



THE AMERICAN LIBRARY OF LAW. 



435 



cided; not, as a general rule, the trials 
which one sees reported in the public jour- 
nals, nor the extended testimony of witness- 
es and speeches of lawyers, but a concise 
statement of the facts involved in particular 
questions of law, a brief memorandum of 
the positions assumed and authorities cited 
by the respective counsel, and the deliber- 
ate opinion of the court. These reports now 
number, excluding mere curiosities and triv- 
ialities, second editious, magazines, and the 
like, about 2500 volumes. Of these the 
United States courts have contributed about 
216. There is a great disparity in the num- 
ber in the different States. Thus, among 
the older States, New York and Pennsyl- 
vania have produced 392 and 184 volumes 
respectively; New Jersey, sixty -two ; and 
Delaware and Rhode Island, eight and ten. 
Among the States most recently organized, 
California exhibits forty -eight volumes; 
Minnesota, twenty ; Kansas, thirteen ; Ne- 
vada, nine ; and Nebraska, three. 

Next in order are the books of "Stat- 
utes." These contain the enactments of 
new laws, the acts of Congress or of the 
State Legislatures ; not the bills and amend- 
ments considered, nor the debates and votes, 
but only the laws finally passed. The pub- 
lication of these follows the adjournment 
of each legislative session. The number of 
volumes does not admit of any precise state- 
ment, for several reasons ; one, because in 
many instances the work of separate ses- 
sions of law-makers is given in small pam- 
phlets; another, because the same law is 
often produced again and again in succes- 
sive revisions and re-enactments. These 
books of reports and statutes are the orig- 
inal sources and authorities from which 
the law is to be learned, but the difficulty 
of grappling with so many has given rise 
to the production of many Digests, Indexes, 
and Treatises, each devoted to a certain 
subject, sphere, or field, and designed to 
give to the lawyer, in brief, convenient 
form, the rules derivable from the reports 
and statutes. And there are about twenty- 
five periodicals which may fairly be deemed 
devoted to jurisprudence as their specialty. 
Among these the Albany Law Journal, Amer- 
ican Law Review, American Law Register, Cen- 
tral Law Journal, Chicago Legal News, Legal 
Intelligencer, Pacific Law Monthly, and West- 



ern Jurist have attained celebrity and influ- 
ence. 

The preparation of treatises has enlisted 
the best efforts of some of the ablest and 
most experienced of American lawyers and 
judges. And some American treatises — 
Greenleaf on Evidence, Kent's Commenta- 
ries on American Law, several of Judge 
Story's volumes, the Law Dictionary and 
the Institutes of Bouvier, "Wheaton's fa- 
mous treatise on International Law, and 
works of Angell, George T. Curtis, Dr. Lie- 
ber, Judge Redfield, Theodore Sedgwick, 
Francis Wharton — have been approved and 
accepted abroad, some of them having re- 
ceived the honor of republication, and even 
of translation. 

Five hundred volumes is a moderate al- 
lowance for the statutes, treatises, digests, 
and periodicals; hence the American library 
of law, developed through our century, now 
exceeds three thousand volumes. 

The occasions for consulting these books 
do not, upon the whole, diminish. True it 
is, upon the one hand, that there is, at the 
present day, less subordination to prece- 
dents, merely as such, than in early years. 
Courts are not as much swayed by a sense 
that they must obey any and every decided 
case. But, on the other hand, the extent, 
variety, and complexity of the questions 
brought before the courts increase faster 
than the learning, mental power, and vigor 
of judicial will among judges; hence there 
is growing inclination to be advised by past 
decisions; enlarged necessity for the judge 
to take time for learning all that is known 
affecting the cause before him ; more hesi- 
tation to decide a question until what has 
been adjudicated upon it has been review- 
ed. No expedients seem to dispense with 
the labor of research among the reports and 
statutes. Authors and publishers, indeed, 
have proffered compilations of various kinds 
as substitutes for the original books ; but 
the working lawyers have generally pre- 
ferred to employ them as means by which 
they might prosecute research among the 
reports and statutes themselves more rapid- 
ly, and carry it further, and have valued 
each compilation in proportion as it fulfilled 
this end. Codes have been enacted in the 
hope of superseding by concise, authorita- 
tive rules the undigested discussions of the 



436 



AMERICAN JURISPRUDENCE. 



reports. Codes are useful ; but immediate- 
ly relieving the lawyer of his library has 
not been their strong point. The books 
found necessary to explain the code some- 
times seem to outnumber those which the 
code assumes to consolidate, besides arous- 
ing a new zeal for research iu older books 
to find the origin and materials of the new 
enactment. Lapse of time does not assist, 
for the books which grow obsolete with the 
advance of civilization are not as many as 
those to which each new year gives birth. 
The necessity, real or imaginary, of "consult- 
ing the books" is a large and growing ele- 
ment iu the professioual labor of the indus- 
trious, paiustaking lawyer. He must — or 
thinks he must — examine, read in, perhaps 
quote from, two or three hundred of the three 
thousand volumes in the collection before 
him, to prepare himself for a single argu- 
ment ; and this adds a serious and wearying 
physical task to the mental duty. Iu the 
morning, when strength is fresh and inter- 
est awake, the books come down easily and 
pleasantly enough. But at night, when the 
brief is writteu, and a hundred or so of vol- 
umes are strewed upon the tables and chairs, 
then one does wish that book covers were 
fitted with springs and muscles like wings 
of birds, and that one could clap his hands 
and frighten the whole bevy to fly up to 
their perches on the lofty shelves. A Hint 
to Inventors ! 

JURISPRUDENCE IN COLONIAL TIMES. 

Most persons will recall reminiscences of 
general reading touching the status of ju- 
risprudence at the close of colonial history, 
which will indicate that the great funda- 
mental principles underlying both the rules 
and the methods of the science were recog- 
nized and obeyed then substantially as they 
are now. The changes have been modifi- 
cations and expansions of old principles, 
improvements of ancestral instruments and 
methods, rather than discoveries that can 
be called new. There has been a great ad- 
vance, but it has consisted in the steady, 
progressive application of the Law to the 
new rights and relations, the new ideas and 
possessions, which the growth of the coun- 
try has developed. 

Throughout colonial times it was under- 
stood that the administration of justice in 



the colonies was guided by the general laws 
and usages of England. Parliament claim- 
ed an authority over the colonies, which 
they repudiated, but it was never under- 
stood, even by advocates of Parliamentary 
authority, that every act of Parliament of 
general operation throughout England was 
necessarily of force in the colonies. At the 
outset the existing laws and the established 
decisions in England formed a body of law 
which obtaiued authority by adoption in 
the English colonies, except so far as pro- 
visions of the charter or peculiar circum- 
stances of the provincial situation prevent- 
ed. This body of law was somewhat mod- 
ified during colonial history by provincial 
laws; also by changes introduced by or 
adopted from new laws in England. The 
various colonies of Euglish origin, there- 
fore, possessed a common law composed of 
the Euglish common law and statutes, and 
deducible from the reported decisions and 
authoritative text-books of English law, 
but varied in many of its applications to 
suit the circumstances or views of the 
American people. This has continued the 
basis of the jurisprudence of these com- 
munities since they have ripened into 
States. The Revolution, which repudiated 
the crown and Parliament as the source 
of sovereign authority in the state, and ac- 
corded all allegiance to the People as the ul- 
timate authors of civil government, did not 
repudiate or materially change the rules 
and methods of the law as theu existing. 

But while jurisprudence remains iu na- 
ture and essential principles substautially 
unchanged, there is great contrast between 
the early and the closing years of our cen- 
tury in respect to many of its applications. 
In so far as family and domestic relation- 
ships remain in fact unchanged, they have 
the same protection of law now as then. 
But views and usages of the authority of a 
parent over his child, of a husband over his 
wife, of a master over his apprentice, have 
advanced among our people, and the law 
has followed, though at a respectful dis- 
tance, the alteration in customs. Corpora- 
tions Were known to the law in their na- 
ture, and in a few of the many uses for 
which, nowadays, they are constituted ; but 
that multitude of incorporated companies 
with which our whole country is now pop- 



COLONIAL JURISPRUDENCE. 



437 



ulous were, in 1775, unborn. Land wa3 
recognized as property, and as fast as the 
■wilderness was reclaimed, our aucestors — 
except for the repudiation of the feudal idea 
that laud was allotted to its possessor as a 
reward for his military services to his sov- 
ereign, and should therefore at his death 
descend undivided to his eldest sou — em- 
ployed the leading rules of the law of En- 
gland to protect the possession of real prop- 
erty and regulate its transfer. But how 
limited must have been the scope of this 
branch of jurisprudence before immigration 
had rendered land valuable, before sur- 
veyors had mapped the general surface to 
render it divisible, and while only a few 
sea-board cities, inland towns, and limited 
agricultural regions spotted what other- 
wise was, so far as practical possession 
and enjoyment were involved, a wilder- 
ness ! Contracts were enforced and person- 
al wrongs redressed by courts of justice 
upon substantially the same general princi- 
ples of what is right between man and man 
as now obtain ; but how few were the oc- 
casions for judicial interference compared 
with what we now witness! How could 
there be any law of railway traffic, or of 
express or telegraph business, when there 
were no railroads, expresses, or telegraphs ? 
or many libel suits, when there were so few 
newspapers ? 

What may be said as to the law of Crimes ? 
The English law, as in force throughout the 
colonies generally, recognized and punish- 
ed as crimes some things which have now 
ceased to be so regarded. Absence from 
church, apostasy, and heresy were punish- 
able. Witchcraft, prophesying, divination, 
and sorcery in various forms were dealt with 
as crimes, upon the theory, now obsolete 
among jurists, that it was possible truth 
could be ascertained or real effects produced 
by human employment of supernatural or 
necromantic means ; and so of " multiplying 
the precious metals." English laws, pre- 
sumably in force in some of the colonies, 
punished some practices as being infringe- 
ments of sound honest trading which now 
pass unchallenged by any legal penalties — 
such as " engrossing," or the buying quanti- 
ties of provisions by a speculator to enhance 
the market price ; " forestalling," or hinder- 
ing merchandise upon its way to market ; 



and " regrating," or buying provisions with- 
in a market with intent to sell them within 
the same. So of exercising a trade without 
having served due apprenticeship. Assem- 
bling in numbers to petition Parliament was 
deemed in England to deserve criminal pen- 
alty ; and a great variety of acts indirectly 
prejudicial to the stability of government 
were construed to come within the offense 
of treason. And besides matters which old 
English law may have made criminal, many 
semi-religious regulations were j)rescribed 
by provincial laws, founded upon a theory 
that civil government should punish dis- 
obedience to the laws of Moses. 

The administration of the criminal law 
was severe in those days as compared with 
ours. Punishments were graver, the pun- 
ishment of death being imposed for almost 
any of the principal offenses, instead of be- 
ing reserved for two or three, the most hei- 
nous. The attitude of government toward 
those accused of crime was arbitrary and 
positive. The proceedings in criminal cases 
were strict, and the accused, if convicted, 
had no appeal. The custody of prisoners 
was little regulated for their comfort or wel- 
fare. But accused persons enjoyed, by adop- 
tion from Euglaud, the privileges of the writ 
of habeas corjms as a protection against un- 
authorized or pretended imprisonments, and 
of trial by jury as a preventive of oppress- 
ive or forced convictions of crime. Some 
of the colonies also possessed important as- 
surances of individual rights in a " Bill of 
Rights," embodying a distinct declaration of 
principles of liberty obligatory on govern- 
ment iu every prosecution of an individual. 
The principles and means which were to op- 
erate toward an amelioration of the criminal 
law were in existence at the era of the Rev- 
olution. And the amelioration which has 
been accomplished is by no means confined 
to American communities or attributable to 
American ideas. It has been as clear and 
steady in England as among us. 

WRITTEN CONSTITUTIONS. 

The art of administering government ac- 
cording to the directions of a written con- 
stitution may fairly be named among the 
products of American thought and effort 
during our century. The adoption of writ- 
ten constitutions by Virginia and Pennsyl- 



438 



AMERICAN JURISPRUDENCE. 



vania in 177G, and by other States not long 
afterward, upon recommendation of the Con- 
tinental Congress, initiated the system 
which has become fundamental to our se- 
curity, prosperity, and progress. 

It is true there were written resolutions 
adopted by the people for the guidance of 
government before the era of the Revolu- 
tion, and there have been such abroad as 
well as among us. They were, however, 
very limited in scope as compared with the 
constitutions of our day. Most of them, the 
more ancient ones, like Magna Charta, for 
example, instead of embodying an attempt 
to create and organize a government, as- 
sumed a government already existing by 
hereditary right, and only sought to impose 
some special restrictions upon its action. 
Now a " constitution," as we in America un- 
derstand the term, is something far deeper 
and more fundamental than any of the state 
papers of past centuries. Our idea is that 
there is no hereditary right, but that all 
the powers of government, all the authori- 
ty which society can rightly exercise toward 
individuals, are originally vested in the 
masses of the people ; that the people meet 
together (by their delegates) to organize a 
government, and freely decide what officers 
they will have to act for them in making 
and administering laws, and what the pow- 
ers of these officers shall bo. Those writ- 
ten directions of the people, declaring what 
their officers may do and what they may 
not, form the constitution. The idea, in its 
practical development, is American. 

The course of jurisprudence through our 
century has shown that it is possible, and, 
with the short though severe exception of 
the civil war. that it is not difficult, for 
an intelligent, conscientious, self-controlled 
community, who realize that the will of the 
people is the source of power, to create and 
administer government by and under those 
written constitutions. It has been practi- 
cable to have these writings framed. The 
thirteen colonies, in obedience to the sug- 
gestion of their Congress, and notwithstand- 
ing tlic embarrassments and discord of the 
period, severally adopted constitutions at a 
very early day, and from time to time since, 
as new communities in the Territories have 
grown to sufficient numbers, they have been 
prompt to ask an enabling act from Con- 



gress, and have readily given the time and 
attention needed for assembling a conven- 
tion of delegates to prepare a constitution, 
and for holding a popular election to enact 
it. It has been practicable to have these 
writings expounded. The judiciary created 
by a constitution sits clothed with power to 
explain whatever doubtful provisions may 
be found therein, and to test the acts of the 
Legislature by the constitutional standard ; 
and these decisions have been readily ac- 
cepted. It has been practicable to secure 
obedieuce. Throughout the land a constant 
succession of elections has been held, pur- 
suant to the directions of the constitution ; 
the defeated candidates have retired cheer- 
fully ; the successful ones have assumed the 
powers, privileges, and duties prescribed by 
the written charter, have administered them 
through the defined term, and have obe- 
diently relinquished them at its close to 
constitutionally elected successors. It has 
been practicable to have these constitu- 
tions amended. They do not become rigid, 
iron-bound shrouds, stifling the growth of 
the people, but contain within themselves 
duo provision for alteration as time may re- 
quire. Thus the people of New York, who 
formed their original constitution in 1777, 
formed new ones iu 1822 and in 184(5 ; and in 
1869, iu a popular election, weighed a new 
constitution against three amendments to 
the old one, and accepted one of the amend- 
ments, while rejecting all other changes. 
The people of Massachusetts, who framed 
a constitution in 1780, have several times 
adopted amendments, and in 1853 employed 
delegates four months in drawing a new 
one, deliberately considered the draft, and 
rejected it at the polls. In Louisiana, where 
the original constitution was framed in 1812, 
new ones were adopted in 1845 and 1853. In 
18G4 a fourth was adopted, but disallowed by- 
Congress, whereupon a fifth, under the re- 
construction laws, was prepared and adopt- 
ed. The history of other States is similar. 

THE TWOFOLD SYSTEM OF COURTS. 

The character of the somewhat complica- 
ted system of government which has become 
established in our country has been the sub- 
ject of much discussion among political 
writers and theorists. For while the duties 
of the various members and officers of gov- 



TWOFOLD .SYSTEM OF COURTS. 



4:ii) 



eminent are pretty distinctly described in 
the anthoritative constitutions, those Ln- 
struments give Little or no theoretic expla- 
nation <>f the nature <>f the anion Intended 
to be formed. Many theories have boon 
propounded. 

At one extreme stands what lias been 
called the "State Rights" theory, which 
presents the Constitution as a species of 
treaty or compact between the States. Ac- 
cording to Uii.s view, the colonies, upon 
declaring and establishing their independ- 
ence, became independent State govern- 
ments. Desiring to organize some mode of 
securing their common interests, they form- 
ed an alliance or compact for that purpose, 
which was the « » 1 * I confederation; and this 
was the agreement of the States, not of the 
people. Finding this compact insufficient 
for the purpose, the States rescinded it, and 
framed another, more intimate and efficient, 
which is the Constitution, and which is like- 
wise a compact of the States, and to which 
States subsequently springing into exist- 
ence by political acts of the people of new 
Territories have given a voluntary adhe- 
sion. 

At the other extreme stands a theory i ha1 
the Union is the original government, and 
the State governments derive t heir existence 
from it or by its authority. Upon this view, 
the colonies, desirous before they had exist- 
ence as Slates to achieve independence, 
formed a union under the Continental Con- 
gress, which, indeed, was not very formally 
organized, and was incomplete and ineffi- 
cient as to many subjects, but was yet a 
real national government, by the military 
operations of which the colonies were set 
free from foreign control, and )>y the per- 
mission Of Which, after they were flee, State 

governments were organized for the exer- 
cise of such powers as were, not, vested in 
the Union. These governments, at the de- 
mand of I he Union, conceded a more explicit 

statement of the powers and authority of 
the, latter in the old Articles of Confeder- 
ation; and still Later, by the Constitution, 
surrendered to the national government all 
those broad powers which it now wields. 
The Union, having at (lie outset given liber- 
ty and political existence to the thirteen 
States, and having acquired extensive terri- 
tory and national jurisdiction beyond their 



limits, has authorized the set tlement of thai 
territory, and lias from time to time, organ- 
ized t lie settlements into states created by 
the Union, and subject to its proper nation- 
al authority. 

A medium view may be slated thus: that 
the colonial governments were in no proper 

sense even the germs which have, ripened 

into the governments which now exist, but 
were ereat it ms of foreign authority, and per 
ished with the sundering of the political 

lies which united our ancestors to the land 

of their origin ; that \\ hen, not, the colonial 
governments, but the people of the colonies, 
became weary of foreign rule and declared 
themselves independent, this, whether man- 
ifested by means of the forms and officers in 
use in colonial government or by other 
modes, was a revolutionary and popular act, 

and not an act, of the governments then ex- 
isting; and the independence which they 
established was rather the independence of 
the People from any government, colonial 
or other, of British origin, than the inde 
pendence of the colonial governments; and 

they, the people, then beci ■, the true and 

ultimate source of all political power, though 

whether the day when they declared this 
right or the day when the adversary ac- 
quiesced in it Should he taken as the liirih- 

day of the principle is a, question of some 

nicety. The people within what, were for- 
merly the thirteen colonies did, by adoption 
of Slate, constitutions and other less formal 

and distinct, but really popular acts, estab- 
lish State governments; and these State 
governments allied themselves tor mutual 
defense and other public purposes, under 
the old Articles of Confederation. This at- 
tempt of the States to provide for the gen- 
eral welfare proved inefficient; upon which 
the people did, by a new, original aid,, rev 
olntionary though peaceful, and popular 

though in part performed by the, use of State 

governmental instrumentalities, withdraw 

from the Slates a port inn of their powers, 

and vest them, as expressed in the ('(institu- 
tion, iii a, new and national government. 

Since that time new communities of people 
coming info existence in newly settled Ter- 
ritories have formed new State governments, 

and have also, upon the Consent of the, na- 
tion, united iii the general government. As 

the general result, the American people have 



440 



AMERICAN JURISPRUDENCE. 



established a duplex political system — a na- 
tional government for national purposes, for 
duties of common concern to all their com- 
munities ; and a government by States for 
objects local or peculiar, or colored by the 
differing situations, circumstances, and de- 
sires of the different communities. 

Very consonant to the last-described the- 
ory is the appearance of the judicial system 
as it exists in our day. An important 
achievement of our people during the cen- 
tury has been the actual organization of a 
duplex system of tribunals, adapted to pre- 
serve and enforce the administration of the 
powers vested in the two fundamental or- 
ganizations respectively. By the constitu- 
tions and laws of the States the people have 
created courts adequate to the administra- 
tion of justice in all matters intrusted to 
the States. By the national Constitution 
they have created a Supreme Court of the 
United States, clothed with power to try 
originally certain controversies of high po- 
litical importance, and also, what is of more 
general interest, to review and correct the 
decisions of subordinate courts. By acts of 
Congress they have created, for the ordi- 
nary administration of justice throughout 
the States in controversies coming within 
the national jurisdiction, a system of dis- 
trict and circuit courts. 

The controversies intrusted to the na- 
tional tribunals, omitting to mention some 
of rare occurrence, are of three kinds: cases 
arising under any law of the United States ; 
cases of admiralty jurisdiction, that is, aris- 
ing at sea, or immediately connected with 
maritime matters ; and cases between cit- 
izens of different States. It was appropri- 
ate and highly consistent with the general 
plan to confide to the States all local and 
separate concerns ; to the Union all general 
and national affairs. A controversy de- 
pending on the laws of the Union or upon 
the general maritime law of the commercial 
world should be referred to the courts of 
the Union, for they might be expected to 
determine such cases more wisely and more 
uniformly and consistently than would be 
done by twenty or thirty independent State 
courts. Controversies between citizens of 
different States are referred to national 
tribunals for other reasons : largely to se- 
cure protection against any favor or par- 



tiality which courts of one State might 
bestow upon its own citizens as compared 
with citizens of another. 

To carry this system into practical effect 
the States have been divided by Congress 
into judicial districts, of which there are 
now fifty-seven in all ; twenty of these dis- 
tricts are co-extensive each with one State ; 
fourteen States are divided each into two 
districts; Alabama, New York, and Ten- 
nessee are each divided into three. For 
each district there is a district judge. The 
districts have also been allotted in circuits, 
of which there are nine, and for each cir- 
cuit there is a circuit judge. These judges 
hold United States circuit and district courts 
at designated places throughout the States, 
systematic provision having been made for 
court-rooms, clerks, marshals, and records, 
wholly independent of State legislation or 
control ; so that every where individuals 
concerned in controversies depending on 
national laws, or arising upon matters of 
maritime origin, or in which citizens of one 
State are pitted against those of another, 
may seek justice in a court of the Union, 
free, by its creation and surroundings and 
by all its precedents and traditions, from 
any undue influence or bias arising from 
differences among the States. To complete 
this statement of the national courts, it 
should be added that appropriate courts 
have been organized for the general admin- 
istration of justice in the Territories and the 
District of Columbia, throughout which the 
States can not act ; and a " Court of Claims" 
has been established for the determination 
of claims by citizens against the govern- 
ment of the Union. 

The organization of an appropriate sys- 
tem of tribunals in the various States is no 
less complete and thorough, though less 
easy to be described in brief. As to almost 
every State it may be said that there is a 
Supreme Court, the judges of which sep- 
arately visit various county seats at stated 
times to hold jury trials, and afterward 
meet and hold court together to review and 
correct the decisions made by each other 
upon their circuits. In New York decisions 
of the Supreme Court may be reviewed in 
the Court of Appeals ; but throughout the 
country generally the Supreme Court of 
each State is the highest court, and the de- 



ADMIRALTY JURISDICTION. 



441 



cisions of the full bench of judges settle the 
law for that State upon all questions fall- 
ing within the sphere of State government. 
If the authority and powers of the national 
government are involved in the case, there 
is a mode by which it may be carried to 
the Supreme Court of the United States for 
final decision. 

For each of the counties into which the 
States are divided there is, as a general 
rule, a court for the trial of suits, known as 
the Court of Common Pleas, the County 
Court, the Circuit Court for the county, or 
some similar name ; also a court for the 
care of estates of deceased persous and su- 
perintendence of children and lunatics, and 
for other matters involving legal care of 
property without active lawsuits, which is 
differently styled Court of Probate, Orphans' 
Court, Surrogate's Court, and the like, in dif- 
ferent States. One town in each county is 
designated by law as the county seat, where 
these county courts shall be held, and where 
all the judicial and public records of the law 
business arising in the county shall be pre- 
served. 

The counties, again, are, except in some 
unsettled regions, divided into townships, 
and throughout these are justices of the 
peace, who have authority to try lawsuits 
involving small amounts or founded upon 
minor wrongs. 

In many of the larger cities, where it has 
been found that the general system of jus- 
tices of the peace and a county court is not 
adequate to the judicial business of the 
place, additional courts for the city are es- 
tablished. Thus in New York, in Buffalo, 
in Cincinnati, in Indianapolis, there is a 
"Superior Court;" in Brooklyn there is a 
"City Court." And for similar reasons the 
justices of the peace are in some cities 
organized into quite a formal system of 
courts. 

For the trial of crimes there is, as a gen- 
eral rule, a similar arrangement. Petty of- 
fenses may be tried before a justice of the 
peace. For offenses of a higher but me- 
dium grade there is very often a Court of 
Sessions, or a criminal jurisdiction in the 
court of the county ; or they are tried in a 
branch of the Supreme Court, sometimes 
bearing the old-fashioned name " Oyer and 
Terminer." 



We are so accustomed to hear allusions to 
these tribunals that their existence seems 
a matter of course. But in truth a great 
deal of organizing power and judicial and 
business ability have been required and 
displayed in establishing over so large a 
country so varied a scheme of courts, co- 
operating in harmony to secure the admin- 
istration of justice. 

OUR ADMIRALTY JURISDICTION. 

Every reader upon legal topics under- 
stands that all commercial nations have ac- 
knowledged a general system of " maritime 
law," and have employed courts of " admi- 
ralty jurisdiction" to administer it ; that 
this law and these courts deal with contro- 
versies arising out of the management of 
shij)8, the carriage and delivery of cargoes, 
the employment and treatment of seamen, 
the award of damages for collisions between 
vessels, or of compensation for salvage of ves- 
sels in peril of wreck, the condemnation 
and sale of ships captured as prize of war, 
and the punishment of crimes on board ship. 
All jurisdiction of this nature was by our 
Constitution reserved from the States, and 
vested, by very general language, in the 
courts of the Union. The manner in which 
the scope of this jurisdiction has grown to 
meet the wants of growing American com- 
merce forms a good illustration of the ex- 
pansibility of our jurisprudence, and shows 
that if the law is administered in the future 
in the same spirit as has prevailed in the 
past, traditions and precedents may guide 
and advise, but can not restrict, progress. 

Admiralty, as has just been said, deals 
with matters arising " at sea." But what 
constitutes the sea, and what are its limits 
and bounds ? Is the mouth of the Hudson 
or of the Mississippi a part of the sea ? If 
so, how far up stream is " sea ?" if not, how 
far out into the blue waters is "river?" 
Goods are laden on board ship in a foreign 
land to come to an American port, and they 
are to be protected for their owner by the 
Admiralty (or district) court while they are 
at sea, and by the Common-law (or State) 
court after they are brought ashore. But 
when do they cease to be "at sea?" Is it 
when the vessel enters the pilotage grounds 
of the port ? or when she is fairly within 
the sheltered harbor? or when she is fast 



442 



AMERICAN JURISPRUDENCE. 



moored ? or not until the goods are piled 
upon tlie solid wharf or pier ? 

The leading test for determining these 
questions in early English times was the 
ehh and flow of the tide. There was a long- 
continued and deep prejudice against the 
admiralty, and as England had no important 
interior commerce, and the tidal line corre- 
sponded quite nearly with the actual wants 
and use of her people in commercial matters, 
that line (with the modification that admi- 
ralty should not interfere, tide or no tide, 
with matters occurring within the legal 
bounds of an English county) was easily 
made the dividing line between the rival 
courts. There is an antique caricature rep- 
resenting the petty disputes that in old 
times engrossed English tribunals on this 
subject, by exhibiting a common-law law- 
yer, armed with a mace, running back and 
forth along the sea-side, defending his juris- 
diction from the incursions of an admiralty 
lawyer, who floats in a tub upon the water, 
brandishing a trident. One can easily im- 
agine that, as the tide rises, the tub is borne 
in to high-water mark, and the jurisdiction 
of the admiralty lawyer is in the ascendant. 
As it falls, the common-law practitioner can 
push his competitor backward with the re- 
ceding waves, until he can flourish the mace 
over the entire moist beach above low water. 

For two-thirds of the century our courts 
followed, without much question, the view 
of admiralty which obtained in England, 
and treated the word "admiralty" in the 
Constitution as meaning only that juris- 
diction, limited to tide-waters, which was 
implied by it in old English law. There 
were no early reasons of importance im- 
pressing a different view. But in later 
years the increase of navigation and all al- 
lied interests upon the Great Lakes and the 
rivers at points above the rise of the tide, 
together with the advance and development 
of all forms of commerce upon the various 
waters connecting the States, have demand- 
ed and obtained an entire reconsideration 
of the subject. The year 1845 may be deem- 
ed the salient era of the change. An act 
of Congress passed in that year asserting 
admiralty jurisdiction over the lakes and 
navigable waters connecting them, and a 
decision of the Supreme Court announced 
in 1846, but founded on facts occurring ear- 



lier, introduced the view that our admiralty 
jurisdiction is not necessarily that recog- 
nized in England when our Constitution 
was framed, but the broader one known in 
commercial countries elsewhere ; and this 
idea has been developed by subsequent ad- 
judications, until it is now understood that 
(except as to matters arising within the in- 
ternal commerce of a single State) the ques- 
tion whether any particular waters are 
within the American admiralty jurisdiction 
or not depends upon whether they are nav- 
igable, not upon their susceptibility to the 
tide; the jurisdiction may extend, as has 
been happily said, " wherever vessels float 
and navigation successful^ aids commerce." 
The result of the advanced opinion is, that 
while commerce within a single State — such 
as the management of a ferry-boat between 
New York and Brooklyn, a claim for wages 
earned in running a boat on a merely local 
canal — is reserved to the State courts, con- 
troversies connected with vessels in gen- 
eral commerce upon our lakes and great 
rivers, upon canals connecting them, upon 
streams which, though originally unnaviga- 
ble, have been practically opened to naviga- 
tion by engineering skill and artificial im- 
provements, and upon waters fit for general 
navigation, are subject to one uniform rule 
of law, course of procedure, and line of de- 
cisions in the national courts. 

There is a parallel question relative to 
the rights of land-owners upon shores of 
streams. By a long-ago adopted rule of 
English law, the proprietors of laud upon 
the banks of petty streams are understood to 
own the land under the water, each to the 
middle — to an imaginary thread running up 
and down the stream half-way between its 
banks. But if the stream is navigable, the 
property of the laud-owner terminates at 
the water-line ; the bed of the stream, with 
the waters, is public. In England, as with 
reference to admiralty jurisdiction, so with 
reference to land titles, a stream was deem- 
ed navigable and public as far up as the tide 
ebbed and flowed. Beyond this point, or if 
there was no tide, it was deemed private. 
Now this is a question which in America 
each State settles for itself, and not one 
which, like admiralty jurisdiction, can be 
determined for the whole country by the 
United States Supreme Court. And the 



PATENTS AND COPYRIGHTS. 



443 



States are not agreed. The courts of most 
of the New England States, and of Missis- 
sippi and Virginia, have been contented to 
follow the old rule. New York, Pennsyl- 
vania, and several of the Southern States 
have, however, adopted the rule that if the 
river is actually navigable for purposes of 
commerce, it must be treated as public, 
whether tidal or not. The West is divided 
on the question. Some States have had no 
occasion yet to consider it. But the prob- 
ability is that ultimately, in all the States 
where there are any important navigable 
streams which are not tidal, the tides will 
be discarded and actual navigability sub- 
stituted as the test of the extent of the 
shore-owner's right. 

PATENTS — COPYRIGHTS. 

The framers of the national Constitution 
foresaw the advantage of general and uni- 
form laws to secure patents for inventions 
and copyrights for writings ; and the power 
to legislate upon these subjects was con- 
ferred upon Congress. There were early 
laws of these kinds ; a system of patent 
law was established by an act of 1793, and 
of copyright law by acts of 1790 and 1802, 
which, as amended by some later laws, con- 
tinued in operation for many years. In 
1831 as to copyrights, and 1836 as to pat- 
ents, substantially new systems of law were 
established ; and these, while they have 
been altered in details, continued in force 
quite down to our own time. In 1870 these 
laws Avere thoroughly re-examined, a new 
system of provisions covering the entire 
field, with the addition of trade-marks, was 
enacted, all the old laws being repeal- 
ed ; and this act, as re-enacted, with some 
changes of arrangement and expression, in 
the United States Revised Statutes, forms 
the present law for the whole country. 

Authors frequently contend, and inventors 
probably agree with them, that the composer 
of a new writing or the contriver of a new 
machine has a natural and inherent right 
of property in his ideas, extending to all the 
copies or reproductions of them. Composi- 
tions and inventions, they urge, are just as 
much the property of those who by talent, 
time, and labor have wrought them to per- 
fection as are crops, manufactures, or mer- 
chandise the property of those whose capital 



and labor have brought them into being ; 
and the law ought, they urge, to protect the 
author in his books (and, by a like reason- 
ing, the inventor in his machine), no matter 
where he lives, nor how long he has enjoyed 
them. In particular it is said to be a ground- 
less injustice to deny to a foreign author the 
same protection as is accorded to a citizen. 
But this theory of an unqualified natural 
property in all the reproductions of an idea, 
whether philosophically correct or not, is 
not accepted as the basis of our jurispru- 
dence. Our law of copyright, for instance, 
rests upon the theory that when an author 
has by his labor and skill embodied ideas 
in a manuscript, he has a natural property 
in his work, but it is limited to the identical 
work he has done, the manuscript he has 
prepared. In this property he will be pro- 
tected, just as is the owner of any other ar- 
ticle : it shall not be used by another with- 
out his consent ; if it is borrowed, the law 
will compel its return ; if it is stolen from 
him, the thief may be punished. But his 
natural property does not preclude him from 
giving his ideas away to the public ; and 
if he does this, no rule of jurisprudence war- 
rants him in reclaiming them, or in exact- 
ing compensation from those who adopt and 
use them. 

But the practical value of a literary work 
or an invention to the original proprietor 
does not consist in his own sole use, but in 
some means of disposing of reproductions. 
Hence public policy advises that, as an en- 
couragement, some control over the repro- 
duction of the fruits of mental labor should 
be assured to the originators of ideas, in ad- 
dition to the natural right of property, by 
authority of which they might, if they chose, 
keep what they produce themselves instead 
of disseminating it. Whatever of monopoly 
is given is proffered by the government not 
as a limited concession to a natural right 
which the law recognizes while unwilling 
or unable to protect it, but as a gift, by way 
of reward or stimulus, additional to native 
right. Such, at least, has been the founda- 
tion of our copyright and patent laws — that 
it is wholesome and for the general good 
not to leave authors and inventors to starve 
upon the mere property in what they pro- 
duce, but to encourage their beneficent la- 
bors by assuring to them a control over all 



444 



AMERICAN JURISPRUDENCE. 



reproductions of tlio results. How much 
control to give them, and for how long, is, 
upon the theory of our jurisprudence, pure- 
ly a question of government policy. 

Under the patent laws, particularly, an 
immense number of inventions have heen 
developed, and many of the patents issued 
have proved very remunerative. The pe- 
cuniary interests secured under these laws 
have become of groat importance. The gen- 
eral features of the manner in which they 
are protected by jurisprudence, by means of 
injunctions to prevent continuing an in- 
fringement, or actions for damages for an 
infringement already committed, are famil- 
iarly known. 

EXTRADITION OF CRIMINALS. 

When a Tweed absconds, a misty ques- 
tion arises over the community, "Can wo 
find him?" And there is a second question, 
"Can Ave fetch him buck?" Or must we 
content ourselves with a new application 
of the words, " We may go to him, but ho 
will not return to us?" The first of these 
questions is for the detective force ; the sec- 
ond is answered by extradition treaties. 

The plan of a government combining in- 
dependent states within a homogeneous 
national organization involves a necessity 
for a duplex provision for returning fugi- 
tive criminals. The national territory, as 
a whole, is naturally a retreat for criminals 
from foreign lands, and offenders against 
the laws of one State will constantly seek 
to escape punishment in their homo courts 
by passing into the territory of another. 
Provision has heen needed, and has been 
made, for both classes. 

The matter of returning criminals who 
escape hither from foreign countries lies 
between the foreign nations and our na- 
tional goverumont. The Governor of a 
State is not warranted, according to the 
prevailing opinion, in sending an escaped 
criminal from a foreign country home again 
tor trial; but it is a matter for the Presi- 
dent and Secretary of state at Washington, 
and for the United States courts. Even 
the national government does not hold it- 
self hound by any absolute or natural obli- 
gation to return an offender. As a rule, ho 
is returned only under some treaty stipula- 
tion. But the United States, mindful of 



the public necessity of reciprocal efforts 
between different nations to promote each 
other's administration of criminal justice, 
has from time to time formed treaties upon 
this subject witli different governments 
abroad, until at length an extensive though 
somewhat complex system has become es- 
tablished, and is in full operation under the 
provisions of a systematic act of Congress 
prescribing the mode of proceeding. 

These treaties have some features in com- 
mon. They aro usually limited to crimes 
involving grave moral guilt, so that merely 
political offenders and refugees can not be 
reclaimed; for the United States has never 
lent its aid to any disposition in monarchic- 
al governments to repress by criminal pun- 
ishments tho exercise of what are deemed 
in this country tho individual rights of the 
citizen. Tho treaties do not require abso- 
lute proof of the guilt of an alleged offend- 
er ; but, as a rule, he can bo sent home only 
upon evidence which would be deemed suf- 
ficient by our law to warrant holding him 
for trial if he wero charged with commit- 
ting tho crime in this country. Whether 
he may be tried here upon any other charge 
than that on which he was sent home is a 
vexed question. And the treaties are re- 
ciprocal ; that is, it is the policy of this 
country to return only offenders of tho samo 
class as those whom wo aro allowed to re- 
claim. This last principle has led to a great 
variety in the provisions of tho different 
treaties governing extradition. 

Thus our treaty with Great Britain of 
August 9, 1842, provides that the United 
States and Great Britain shall, upon mutual 
requisitions by their authorities, deliver up 
to justice all persons who, being charged 
with the crimo of murder, or assault with 
intent to commit murder, or piracy, or arson, 
or robbery, or forgery, or tho utterance of 
forged paper, committed within the juris- 
diction of either, shall seek an asylum or be 
found within the territories of the other. 
Aud our treaty with the Hawaiian Islands 
of December 20, 1849, contains provisions 
corresponding with these. 

We have three treaties with France pro- 
viding for returning from either country to 
tho other persons accused of murder or at- 
tempt to commit murder; or with rape, for- 
gery, arson, robbery, burglary ; or with em- 



EXTRADITION TREATIES. 



445 



bezzlenieut by public officers or private 
employes, or forging, or circulating counter- 
feit coin or false notes, when such offense is 
subject to infamous punishment. With the 
Orange Free State we have a treaty of De- 
cember 22, 1871, covering these crimes, with 
the addition of piracy. 

Our treaty with Sweden of March 21, 

1860, includes murder or attempt to commit 
murder, rape, piracy (including aggravated 
mutinies of seamen), arson, robbery and 
burglary, forgery, and the fabrication of 
counterfeit coin or paper money, and embez- 
zlement by public officers. The treaty of 
July 3, 1850, with Austria, and that with San 
Salvador of June 28, 1872, are to the same 
effect. So are the treaties with Nicaragua, 
June 25, 1870, and with Equador of June 28, 
1872, except that these omit attempts to 
murder. So is that with Venezuela of Au- 
gust 27, 18G0, that with the Dominican Re- 
public of February 8, 1867, that with Italy 
of March 23, 1868, and that with Belgium 
of March 19, 1874, except that each of these 
extends to the embezzlement of private 
funds. To the same effect is the treaty with 
Switzerland of November 25, 1850, except 
that counterfeiting is omitted, and the em- 
bezzlement of private funds embraced. 

Our treaty with Prussia of Juno 16, 1852, 
includes murder or assaults with intent to 
commit murder, piracy, arson, robbery, for- 
gery, or utterance of forged papers, or fabri- 
cation of counterfeit coin or paper money, 
and embezzlement of public funds. By a 
subsequent treaty this engagement is ex- 
tended to all the states of the North Ger- 
man Confederation. Aud the same enu- 
meration of crimes is found in the treaty 
with Bavaria of September 12, 1853. 

Our treaty with Mexico of December 11, 

1861, embraces murder, assault with iutent 
to commit murder, mutilation, piracy, arson, 
rape, kidnaping (whether by force or de- 
ception), forgery aud counterfeiting, or cir- 
culating forged or counterfeit coin or paper 
money, embezzlement of public moneys, rob- 
bery or burglary, and larceny of property 
above twenty-live dollars in value, commit- 
ted within the frontier States and Territo- 
ries of the contracting parties. 

Our treaty with Peru of September 12, 
1870, provides for murder ; for rape and 
abduction by force ; bigamy and arson ; 



kidnaping, by force or deception ; robbery, 
larceny, burglary ; counterfeiting ; forgery 
— broadly defined, and extended to public 
securities, judicial acts and records, postage 
and revenue stamps, public aud authentic 
deeds and documents ; embezzlement of pub- 
lic or private funds; fraudulent bankrupt- 
cy ; fraudulent barratry ; mutiny, when the 
crew have taken forcible possession of the 
ship, or have transferred it to pirates ; severe 
injuries intentionally caused on railroads, to 
telegraph lines, or to persons by means of 
explosions of mines or steam-boilers; and 
piracy. 

So much for the right or duty of our na- 
tion to claim or to make return of a fugitive 
when the question arises between ours and 
a foreign country. Quite as often, perhaps, 
it arises where a criminal escapes from one 
State into another. With these cases the 
general government has no concern, except 
that Congress has prescribed the mode of 
proceeding. The right and the duty lie be- 
tween the two States. The President and 
Secretary of State at Washington have no 
part in the extradition. The Governor of 
the one State makes a requisition upon the 
Governor of the other, demanding the re- 
turn of the offender ; and upon this demand, 
accompanied by certain formal proofs, being 
laid before the Governor of the other, it is 
his duty to direct the fugitive, if found 
within his State, to bo arrested and sent 
home for trial. 

But if a Governor should refuse perform- 
ance of this duty, there does uot appear to 
bo any way by which it can be compelled. 
The national courts can not oblige him to 
act. The Constitution simply says that 
such a fugitive "shall be delivered up," but 
leaves the performance of the duty to the 
several States. 

BANKRUPTCY. 

Independent of something like a bank- 
rupt law, a merchant who fails in business 
is liable to be harassod to an extreme by 
the pressing demands and suits of rival cred- 
itors, and to be for long years excluded from 
resuming industry or seeking new prosperi- 
ty by the peril that any acquisitions he may 
make will be seized by those who hold old 
claims — a peril which both disheartens him 
in exertion and discourages those who might 



446 



AMERICAN JURISPRUDENCE. 



be willing to give him assistance and cred- 
it. The creditors being independent in pro- 
ceedings to collect their dues, each endeav- 
ors to anticipate the others, and numerous 
anecdotes are current of ingenious devices 
of attorneys to outstrip one another in the 
race of diligence. There is the story of one 
who " attached" the water-wheel of a fac- 
tory whose proprietors would not pay his 
demand. In another anecdote four attor- 
neys, in pursuit of the same debtor, reach- 
ed the railroad terminus late at night, and 
three, by concert to exclude the other, hired 
the only cab in sight, meaning to belate the 
fourth by compelling him to walk; but he 
jumped on the box, bought cab and horse 
from the driver, drove to a choice spot, and 
upset the cab with the door back against a 
stone wall, then rau forward and served his 
writ while his competitors were struggling 
among the cushions and the broken glass. 
So an absconding debtor, who undertook to 
escape across a lake on skates, bearing the 
proceeds of his fraudulent sales in a fat 
pocket-book, was followed and overtaken 
by a collecting agent, also upou skates ; and 
when the unlucky fugitive broke through 
the ice, the collector insisted on his throw- 
ing out the pocket-book to pay demands in 
full before he would help him ashore. 

Upon the other hand, the pressure of 
creditors often impels debtors to schemes 
of fraud or of unjust preference in paying 
rival claimants. 

In view of these tendencies of the ordina- 
ry laws for collection of debts, the Consti- 
tution has authorized Congress to establish 
uniform laws upon the subject of bankrupt- 
cies. Precisely what is "a bankrupt law" 
has been the subject of some conflicting 
discussion. But practically it is understood 
to be a law which ascertains what persons 
have become, from want of means, unable 
to pay their debts in ordinary course of 
business, which takes their remaining prop- 
erty into legal custody, and distributes it 
equitably among the persons who are proved 
to have just demands, and which gives the 
debtor, except in such few cases as are ex- 
cluded from the benefit, a discharge from 
his past debts, assuring him of immunity 
from further lawsuits to collect them. 

In 1800, and again in 1841, laws of this 
description were enacted under stress of 



general commercial trouble then existing; 
but each was, within two or three years, 
repealed. In 1867 a comprehensive and 
well-considered bankrupt law was passed. 
Proposals for its repeal have been warmly 
urged and earnestly discussed, but have 
thus far resulted only in some comprehen- 
sive amendments, indicating that it may 
probably long continue a feature of the ju- 
risprudence of the country. 

Under this law the petition of a debtor 
to be discharged as a bankrupt, or of his 
creditors that a surrender of his estate may 
be compelled, brings up, in the first instance, 
the question whether the debtor is really a 
bankrupt and within the provisions of the 
law. If the debtor is the petitioner, there 
is not much opportunity for question upon 
this point ; but when creditors make the 
application, they must prove that the debt- 
or has committed some "act of bankruptcy." 
that he has absconded or concealed himself, 
or has concealed or disposed of or assigned 
his property to defraud his creditors ; or has 
been arrested or imprisoned for debt for at 
least a week ; or has allowed one creditor 
in preference to others to get judgment 
against him or to seize his property ; or 
has suspended payment of ordinary business 
paper for a fortnight. Such acts as these 
expose a person to be thrown into bank- 
ruptcy by a creditor. 

After an adjudication that the debtor is 
a bankrupt, an assignee is appointed, gener- 
ally upon a choice by the creditors, to take 
and dispose of the debtor's estate. The 
debtor is required to furnish schedules or 
lists of all his property, also of all his debts, 
and may be strictly examined upon oath as 
to all the facts. The assignee takes posses- 
sion of the property, sells it, defrays any 
specific charges or liens that ought to be 
paid in full, and collects the proceeds to be 
distributed among the creditors. To enable 
him to do this, very full powers are given 
him to take the place of the bankrupt in 
all matters connected with his property, 
and to prosecute any suits which the bank- 
rupt might have done if the surrender had 
not been made. 

Meantime an opportunity is accorded to 
the creditors to make proof of their de- 
mands. Each one must file a statement 
and make oath, and if his claim is disputed, 



CALIFORNIA LAND CLAIMS. 



447 



must adduce proof tliat it is lawful. The 
questions, bow much is due, at what date, 
*what interest is to be allowed, what offsets 
should be made, and the like, are all deter- 
mined. The money realized by the assignee 
is then paid over by him to the creditors. 
The general rule is to distribute the fund 
among the creditors in proportion to their 
demands proved. But the expeuses of the 
proceedings, and some demands, such as 
debts to the United States or to the State 
in which the proceedings are held, taxes, 
and wages recently earned to the amount 
of $50, are allowed to be paid in full be- 
fore ordinary debts. 

The ultimate step in the proceedings is to 
grant the debtor a discharge. This may be 
refused him if he has been guilty of miscon- 
duct, such as giving false testimony, with- 
holding his property from the assignee, falsi- 
fying his accounts, or giving portions of his 
estate to particular creditors to buy their 
consent to a discharge. And there are some 
restrictions applicable where a debtor's 
property fails to pay more than a specified 
portion of his debts. The discharge does 
not extend to debts incurred by embezzle- 
ment, or positive fraud, or breach of trust. 
But, with exceptions like these, one main 
purpose of the law is to set the bankrupt 
free from indebtedness, that he may com- 
mence business life anew. 

THE CALIFORNIA LAND CLAIMS. 

Between the California of Dana's Two 
Tears Before the Mast and that of Nordhoff's 
recent volumes, how great is the difference ! 
A third part of a century has seen an im- 
mense wilderness become a flourishing and 
influential State. The course of this trans- 
formation threw upon the United States 
judiciary the burden of determining a con- 
glomeration of controversies fully as com- 
plex, novel, and pressing as any which the 
history of jurisprudence discloses — the "pri- 
vate land claims." 

About a month after our declaration of 
independence, by a royal order of the gov- 
ernment of Spain, provinces of Mexico which 
included California were organized as " the 
Internal Provinces of New Spain." From 
that time until 1847 — the date of the trans- 
fer of California to the United States, upon 
the close of our war with Mexico, closely fol- 



lowed in 1848 by the discovery of gold — the 
province was under a succession of Spanish 
and Mexican governments, whose policy was 
to make liberal grants of land to persons 
who would engage to settle upon and culti- 
vate the tracts given them. This was done 
for the purpose of attracting immigrants. 
Immense quantities — eleven square leagues 
being a usual limit — were granted without 
exacting any payment, upon simple condi- 
tions that the settler should occupy, build 
upon, and cultivate his acquisition. 

By the treaty which transferred Califor- 
nia from Mexico to the United States our 
government engaged to recognize and pro- 
tect the rights of these settlers ; not only 
of those who had fully performed all condi- 
tions and had received full papers of title 
to their lands, but also those who, by any 
circumstances, ought to be allowed to con- 
tinue incomplete or delayed improvements, 
and to acquire lands which had been prom- 
ised them therefor. 

At the time of the treaty an immense 
number of these claims existed. In some 
cases the settler had died, and there were 
claims of his heirs to be considered; in oth- 
ers, he had sold his claim, and the purchaser 
demanded to fulfill the conditions and take 
the title in his place ; or he had commenced 
building and cultivation, but had delayed 
completing what was prescribed ; or he had 
been prevented from so doing, notwithstand- 
ing his best efforts ; or he had neglected and 
abandoned his grant altogether ; or he had 
lost his papers. The claims involved ques- 
tions of all sorts ; but the United States 
agreed to take the place of Mexico in re- 
gard to the lauds, to recognize and respect 
such equitable claims as had their origin in 
the action of the Mexican government, but 
were yet inchoate and imperfect, and to take 
such steps as were needed to perfect them, 
just as if the sovereignty of the country 
had continued unchanged. 

The ink of this treaty was hardly dry 
when the discovery of gold aroused intense 
interest in these wild lands. Claims that 
had been neglected were revived; settle- 
ments that had been abandoned were re- 
newed. All kinds of reasons were brought 
forward to excuse the delays of grantees in 
taking possession and cultivating as they 
had engaged. False claims were advanced, 



448 



AMERICAN JURISPRUDENCE. 



and spurious records aud papers were pre- 
pared to support them. There arose very 
rapidly a large mass of claims very novel, 
complex, and extensive, and pressed with 
the utmost zeal. 

Under these circumstances Congress in 
1851 created a board of commissioners, who 
should, under review by the United States 
courts, try and determine these claims ; and 
this complicated and difficult task has been, 
during the past quarter of a century, quietly 
and successfully accomplished. The extent 
and scope of the Governors' powers, under 
the old laws of Spain and Mexico, to make 
these grants have been ascertained, and the 
date when their power ceased has been de- 
termined. Of course all grants made in ex- 
cess of their authority, or after it expired, 
have been adjudged valueless. The validi- 
ty of each grant has been examined — wheth- 
er the papers were genuine, whether they 
were regular in form and duly signed. The 
conditions imposed upon the grantee have 
received attention, and the claimant has 
been required to show by some proper proof 
that the grantee took possession, that he 
built and cultivated as was required, or to 
show some excuse. Claims which could not 
be substantiated have been forever annulled, 
while all which woiddbear a judicial inves- 
tigation have been formally confirmed, and 
complete and final evidences of title have 
been issued to the claimants. 

In this affair the number and variety of 
the claims the extent of the tracts of land 
involved, their remoteness from the seat of 
government and settled portions of our coun- 
try, the difficulty of obtaining evidence in 
that wilderness, the novelty and obscurity 
of the questions involved, and the value 
placed upon the lands since their sudden 
appreciation, have combined to render the 
task of judicial determination one of unusu- 
al difficulty and magnitude. 

And it is worth noting that during ear- 
lier years of the century numerous land 
claims of similar nature, though less ex- 
tended in respect of territory, less sudden 
in their rise, and less romantic in the at- 
tendant circumstances, involving lands in 
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mis- 
sissippi, and Missouri, have been determined 
by our judiciary upon similar principles 
and with like success. 



EIGHTS OF MARRIED WOMEN. 

By the English law, as enforced through 
early years in this country except in Loui- 
siana, the legal existence andrights of a wife 
were for the most part deemed merged in 
those of her husbaud. She continued, in- 
deed, the owner of her lands, but he con- 
trolled them and their income. Money or 
personal property coming to her, vested at 
once in him, and so did the fruits or pro- 
ceeds of any demand or right of action, if 
he would take the trouble to assert his mar- 
ital rights. Her services also belonged to 
him. She was disabled from making any 
contracts. In almost all judicial proceed- 
ings affecting her he either took her place 
or stood by her side, with a practical con- 
trol of the affair.' As to any criminal acts 
done in his presence, she was irresponsible, 
and he alone was legally to blame. 

Throughout the recent third of the cen- 
tury in many of the States there has been 
a steady change introduced by legislation, 
and carried into effect by the courts in the 
whole jurisprudence of this subject. The 
change has been of slow growth. The in- 
creased rights aud privileges have been ac- 
corded piecemeal. Take Connecticut, for 
example. Full and complete protection to 
married women in their rights of property, 
against creditors of the husband, is now the 
established policy of the State. But this 
result has been attained gradually and with 
difficulty. The first act was passed in 1845 ; 
it protected the interest of the husbaud in 
the real estate of the wife which was hers 
at the time of the marriage, or accrued to 
her by devise or inheritance during covert- 
ure. The second, in 1849, protected the 
personal estate which should thereafter ac- 
crue to her during her married life by be- 
quest or distribution, by vesting it in him 
as trustee for her. The third, in 1850, pro- 
tected real estate conveyed to her in con- 
sideration of money or property acquired 
by her personal services. The fourth, also 
in 1850, protected re -investments of the 
avails of her real estate when sold. The 
fifth, in 1853, vested in her for her sole use 
all her property, real and personal, when 
abandoned. The sixth, in 1855, extended 
the provisions of the act of 1849 to personal 
property owned by her at time of marriage. 
The seventh, in 1856, extended the provis- 



HOMESTEAD AND EXEMPTION LAWS. 



449 



ions of the act of 1849 to patent -rights, 
copyrights, pensions, and grants and allow- 
ances by government ; and an eighth, in 
1857, further extended it to property ac- 
quired by gift. The ninth, in 1860, extended 
the act of 1850 respecting property acquired 
by personal services to re-investments of 
the same. The tenth, in 1865, extended the 
provisions of the act of 1845 to real estate 
acquired by gift or purchase ; and by the 
eleventh, in 1866, that of 1849 was extend- 
ed and applied to all personal property, 
whether acquired before or after marriage. 
But while the method of the reform has 
been irregular, the results have been exten- 
sive and thorough ; and the rules that the 
real and personal property of a wife, coming 
to her before or after marriage, continues 
hers, to be used, enjoyed, and disposed of, 
except as to manner and form of convey- 
ance, as if she were single, may be said to 
be substantially true in the majority of the 
States. 

An independent capacity to sue and be 
sued alone has been conferred in many ; 
and in not a few of the States wide powers 
to make contracts and to carry on general 
business, even to the extent of employing 
the husband as a managing agent of a large 
farm or manufacturing establishment, have 
been conferred. 

HOMESTEAD AND EXEMPTION LAWS. 

Books tell us of ancient laws by which a 
debtor who could not pay his debts might, 
upon demand of his creditors, be cut in 
pieces and divided bodily among them. 
Rigor like this had become obsolete long 
before the commencement of our century, 
but the law for the collection of debts was 
still rigid in exacting all pi-operty that 
could be obtained from a debtor for the 
satisfaction of his creditors. In modern 
years the view has obtained that creditors 
shall not have every thing ; some reserva- 
tion of property shall be allowed, to provide 
for the instant wants of an insolvent, and to 
relieve his family from absolute destitution. 
This privilege is given by laws of the vari- 
ous States allowing a head of a family to 
designate by public record a house and lot 
as his "homestead," which shall not there- 
after be taken for his general debts, and by 
laws prescribing certain kinds and amounts 
29 



of personal property which shall be "ex- 
empt from sale on execution." The prin- 
ciple of allowing a debtor to retain some 
little property for himself, and still more for 
his family, if he has one, is now recognized 
throughout the country. The extent of the 
privilege granted differs in the different 
States. Probably every State accords some 
privilege of exemption of personal property 
— clothing, a little live stock, and necessary 
tools for the debtor's farm, a limited number 
of articles of furniture for the house, wages 
just earned, and the like ; but the different 
statutes upon the subject run into an im- 
mense number of petty details. 

Homestead exemptions are not allowed in 
all the States. Down to 1875, Connecticut, 
Delaware, Indiana, Maryland, Oregon, Penn- 
sylvania, and Rhode Island, also the District 
of Columbia, appear not to have passed laws 
of this kind. Through the other States 
there are laws by which a head of a family 
may designate a homestead, and protect it 
from being sold for his debts, except for the 
price of it, or for a mortgage upon it, or oth- 
er special indebtedness. If the property is 
a farm, the privilege is limited in about 
half the States by number of acres ; forty, 
eighty, or one hundred and sixty is a com- 
mon limit. In others the restriction is by 
value, such as $5000, .$2000, or in some of the 
States less. In Texas two hundred acres 
may be exempt. If the property is a town 
or city lot, the exemption is generally limit- 
ed by a value corresponding to the value al- 
lowed for farms, or the quantity is closely 
restricted — as to a quarter or half an acre. 
The homestead laws usually give the wife 
of the proprietor some control over any sale 
or mortgage of the property. 

mechanics' lien laws. 

When an owner of land desires to erect a 
building, he does not usually himself buy 
the wood, the brick, and the iron-mongery 
needed, nor personally hire and pay the 
workmen employed. By custom he makes 
a contract with a builder for the erection, 
and the builder makes the purchases and 
employs the workmen. It has long been 
found that this system is prolific of frauds 
or losses to those who sell the materials or 
do the labor. The builder may collect the 
contract price of the house from the owner, 



450 



AMERICAN JURISPRUDENCE. 



and refuse to pay his subordinates, and the 
latter may lose their remedy against the 
builder for want of his having any tangible 
property which they can reach, and against 
the owner because he made no contract with 
them, while they can not reclaim each what 
he contributed toward the work, because, 
whatever it is, it has become inextricably 
involved in the building. 

To prevent or redress such frauds, laws 
have gradually been framed in the various 
States to give the subordinate mechanics 
a lien upon the property which they assist 
to improve. Under these laws, "matei-ial 
men," as those who sell materials for a build- 
ing may be called, or laborers, may file a 
notice in a designated public office, setting 
forth what they have done toward a build- 
ing, and what is due to them for the same. 
By doing this they gain a right to be paid 
out of the value of the property. If the 
contractor pays them, as he should do, very 
well. If he does not, the owner may pay 
them and deduct from the money due the 
contractor. If neither will pay, the proper- 
ty may be sold, and the demands paid from 
the proceeds. 

Laws of this description exist in nearly 
all the States, though they vary greatly in 
details, and within any one State the law 
may differ in different counties. In Louisi- 
ana and Florida a lien is allowed for ad- 
vances made or work done in carrying on a 
plantation or farm. 

PROTECTION OF ANIMALS. 

The notable and successful efforts which 
have been made for the protection of ani- 
mals involve a new thought. In the admin- 
istration of the law in old times there is 
very little trace of any recognition of ani- 
mals as entitled in themselves to any legal 
care or protection. Animals have very long 
been esteemed property, and ill treatment 
of one which rendered it less valuable to 
the owner has been recognized as a wrong 
which the law would redress. Inhuman 
and barbarous treatment may also be com- 
mitted under circumstances rendering it de- 
moralizing to those who witness it ; on this 
ground it has long been punishable. But 
the additional view that sentient life should 
be, for its own sake, sheltered and guarded 
by the law, has only lately been developed 



with any distinctness and efficiency. Found- 
ed upon this sentiment, laws and efficient 
societies for the prevention of cruelty to ani- 
mals have been established in thirty-seven 
of the States and Territories. Throughout 
the world there are no less than 229 of these 
societies, the movement having been initi- 
ated by the New York society. 

REFORMED PROCEDURE. 

The English law of civil rights and reme- 
dies, as administered throughout our coun- 
try at the era of our Revolution, aud for more 
than half a century afterward, abounded in 
strict rules and exact forms, which were de- 
signed, and, if skillfully followed, were in 
many respects adapted, to shorten and per- 
haps to simplify legal proceedings, but, as 
actually pursued, were often the means of 
doing injustice in the name of the Law. The 
proceedings in the law courts were also sub- 
ject to interference in large classes of cases 
from courts of equity, whose mode of pro- 
ceeding and principles of deciding causes 
were very different from those of the law 
courts. Thus it might happen that a man 
who had an unquestionable right to recover 
in a suit lost his case because his lawyers 
brought the suit in the wrong court, or be- 
cause, bringing it in the right court, they 
drew the papers in the wrong form of action. 
The double and technical system which pre- 
vailed gave rise to great inconvenience, and 
the fictions constantly employed strength- 
ened the distrust which other causes created. 
Attempts have often been made to justify 
the obnoxious features of the system upon 
the ground of accuracy, simplicity, brevity, 
and the like ; but, in truth, the reasons were 
historic, not logical or practical. The prac- 
tice was as it had grown to be, not as it 
ought to be. 

The Reformed practice is now just above 
a quarter of a century old. It was initiated 
by a Code of Procedure adopted in New York 
in 1848, and amended and re-enacted in 1849. 
More than half the States have since adopt- 
ed its essential principles and leading pro- 
visions, and they underlie a very important 
measure of law reform which has recently 
gone into operation in England. 

The important features of these codes of 
reformed procedure are four. 1. The distinc- 
tion between courts of law and equity is 



CODES AND REVISED STATUTES. 



451 



abrogated; tlie same court has power to 
apply the rules of law or principles of equity 
to the controversy before it as circumstances 
may require. 2. Forms of action, particu- 
larly the technical differences between what 
used to be called actions of assumpsit and 
debt, of case and trespass, of trover and re- 
plevin, are abolished ; John Doe and Rich- 
ard Roe are dead and buried. 3. They recog- 
nize the assignee of all assignable demands ; 
and allow the real owner of the cause of 
action to sue, instead of requiring the action 
to be brought, by fiction of law, in the name 
of the original party, as was formerly the 
case. 4. They discard the strict technical 
nicety of pleading and practice which was 
required by the common-law system; and 
seek to elicit and try the real merits of the 
controversy, permittiug liberal amendments, 
and disregarding errors and variances, un- 
less such as to cause real injustice. 

CODES AND REVISED STATUTES. 

The readiness of American Legislatures to 
codify or revise the laws is a noticeable feat- 
ure. By a code, in strict usage, is under- 
stood a concise, comprehensive, systematic 
re-enactment of the law, deduced from both 
sources — the pre-existing statutes and the 
adjudications of courts. A revision of the 
statutes is a less extensive undertaking ; it 
aims only to exhibit, in brief compass and 
with proper corrections and improvements, 
the statutes which have been for a period 
accumulating in annual volumes. A code, 
if perfect and unambiguous, would be at 
its first enactment a substitute both for 
statutes and reports previously in use. A 
revision, however complete, would supersede 
only previous acts of the Legislature. But 
this distinction is not very nicely regarded 
in the nomenclature of our books of legisla- 
tion. There are, at the present time, about 
ten " Codes," so called, and partaking large- 
ly of the nature of a true code ; about fif- 
teen systems of " Revised Statutes ;" and 
about twelve compilations, which are in 
substance revisions, but are named " Gen- 
eral Statutes," " Compiled Statutes," and the 
like. Some works of this class are merely 
private compilations. But nearly every 
State has either authorized and adopted as 
official a compilation of its laws by lawyers 
of ability and reputation, or has employed 



commissioners to draft its laws into a sys- 
tem, and has re-enacted them as compiled. 
In many of the States one or other of these 
things has been done several times. There 
does not appear to be any State, with per- 
haps the exception of Pennsylvania and Ten- 
nessee, which does not possess a codification 
or revision of the laws made since the com- 
mencement of 1860 ; and in the great ma- 
jority there are such dating within the past 
ten years. 

Some of these works involve important 
and extended reforms of the pre-existing 
law ; others do not. The New York Revised 
Statutes, adopted in 1828 and 1830, and the 
Massachusetts General Statutes of 1860, are 
notable examples of revisions embodying 
many improvements. The United States 
Revised Statutes (1873) is an instance of a 
simple consolidation. The statutes, as an- 
nually published, were rapidly accumula- 
ting, and had become not only inconvenient- 
ly bulky, but inconsistent and obscure. The 
revision aims to present, in a single volume, 
the general and permanent laws, previous- 
ly running through seventeen volumes, ac- 
curately condensed, but unchanged in sub- 
stance. 

A BRIEF RETROSPECT. 

This paper draws toward a close, but not 
for want of further examples of the progress 
of our law. The brief illustrations which 
have been given might easily be doubled in 
number. Each one suggests auxiliary top- 
ics. Jurisprudence has not only made ex- 
position of the law in three thousand pub- 
lished volumes, and declared its rules anew 
in half a hundred distiuct codes or revisions, 
but has dotted the States with Law Schools 
well equipped for the systematic instruction 
of her disciples. She has not only develop- 
ed written constitutions and wrought out a 
twofold system of courts, but has erected 
State and national Capitals, and organized 
county seats supplied with buildings, ex- 
tensive record books and files, and libraries 
appropriate for judicial labor. She has not 
only devised a new and homogeneous mode 
of pleading and practice in courts of justice, 
but has extensively relaxed the old tech- 
nical rules excluding Witnesses who might be 
interested in a suit, even to the extent in 
several jurisdictions of allowing one upon 
trial for a crime to testify in his own behalf. 



452 



AMERICAN JURISPRUDENCE. 



She has not only established the law of the 
sea over our inland waters, hut has also 
brought the employment and treatment of 
Merchant Seamen under one uniform and na- 
tional system of regulations. Upon the 
land she has not only adjusted the private 
land claims arising against former govern- 
ments, she has also administered systems of 
laws governing the survey and disposal of 
the Public Lands, under which the territory 
owned by the nation or by the various States 
has been subdivided and opened to a peace- 
ful settlement and cultivation as fast as has 
been desired. She has promoted such set- 
tlement by a hospitable Naturalisation, Law ; 
by large modifications of the ancient Land 
Titles, discarding primogeniture and compli- 
cated entails and trusts, and promoting sub- 
division and ready sale of estates ; by pre- 
scribing modes in which lands needed for 
public uses may be freely taken in right of 
Eminent Domain, but strictly requiring com- 
pensation to the land-owner ; and by devis- 
ing in the rich mineral Territories of the 
far West appropriate rules for the develop- 
ment of Mines and the protection of mining 
claims. Witnessing, without power to pre- 
vent them, the evils of a gigantic system of 
Slavery and the horrors of a Civil War, she did 
something while they lasted to control and 
restrain them, and is doing much in super- 
intending the reconstruction of the shatter- 
ed social fabric, in harmonizing the indi- 
vidual controversies of which the war was 
so fruitful, and has fairly entered upon the 
newly assigned duty of elevating four mill- 
ions of a lately enslaved and still depressed 
and ignorant race to enjoyment of equal 
Civil Bights. She has encouraged Corpora- 
tions, has added to the old method of incor- 
poration by charter a free system of general 
laws for their formation, management, and 
dissolution, and to the old remedies against 
corporate property a principle of individual 
liability, so that incorporation has become a 
familiar, convenient, and approved mode of 
uniting many men and aggregating large 
capital in the pursuit of almost every spe- 
cies of enterprise or purpose, of very many 
purposes to which in old times it never was, 
and in old countries even now it scarcely is, 
applied. She has rescued Banking from the 
uncertain basis of private capital and re- 
sponsibility, and has established it upon a 



foundation of securities lodged with govern- 
ment — that of the State or nation, as you 
please — for the bill-holder's protection. She 
has liberalized the ancient law of Carriers, 
giving them leave to restrict their liability 
by a special contract, and thus has promoted 
that expansion of our facilities for commerce 
which has been accomplished by adding to 
the ships, stage-coaches, and baggage-wag- 
ons of old times our immense net-work of 
canals, steamboats, and railway routes, ex- 
press and telegraph lines. She has fostered 
the principle of education of the common 
people at the charge of the State, and super- 
intends a comprehensive and efficient sys- 
tem of Public Schools. She has liberalized 
the Criminal Law and ameliorated Prison 
Discipline (until the element of humanity 
sometimes seems to verge upon laxity), has 
restricted the old views of Sedition and Trea- 
son to conform to the principles of a popular 
government, and has given increased effi- 
ciency to the writ of Habeas Corpus; but 
has by Liquor Laws, embodying even the en- 
deavor to prohibit the traffic in intoxica- 
ting drink entirely, or to compel the seller 
to make compensation for all damages re- 
sulting from excess, and by stringent laws 
against Abortion, Seduction, and the traffic 
in Vicious Literature and merchandise, made 
punishable some causes of demoralization 
which our forefathers considered must be 
exempt from punishment because the vic- 
tim was a willing one. 

These topics might well receive extended 
explanation ; and if space could be allowed, 
the writer would gladly add some descrip- 
tive sketches of Celebrities — of our eminent 
judges, brilliant advocates, and judicious 
legislators ; some narratives of the Great 
Trials of the century, with explanations of 
their influence upon the tone of judicial 
thought ; and perhaps some revelations of 
the methods and achievements of American 
Detectives. 

"she hath done what she could." 

These achievements of Jurisprudence, 
when compared with the works of her sis- 
ters in other fields of labor, appear moder- 
ate, plain, and plodding, rather than rapid, 
brilliant, or extensive. But then, for many, 
many centuries, Jurisprudence has had no 
gift of new powers. Sudden and wonder- 



CONCLUSION. 



453 



ful progress iu either of the various fields 
of human effort is generally observable with- 
in a few centuries after some new power or 
means has been bestowed. Not three cen- 
turies have passed since the Novum Organon 
of Bacon gave to practical science a new 
method of research, which has substituted 
astronomy for astrology, chemistry for al- 
chemy, and has rendered attainments in 
science rapid and easy which upon old 
methods would have remained impossible. 
The steam-engine was a new gift to Com- 
merce and Manufactures ; so was the print- 
ing-press to Literature ; so has been the 
telegraph to Journalism. The enunciation 
and application of the principle that " gov- 
ernments derive their just powers from the 
consent of the governed," as a substitute 
for the idea of a divinely given, hereditarily 
transmitted right, was a gift of a new power 
to Government. These were not improve- 
ments in old methods; they involved the 
total subversion of old methods and sub- 
stitution of new ones. They are compara- 



tively modern ; some of them are very re- 
cent, and one need not wonder that brilliant 
results are flowing from them within our 
century. But how long it is since Anglo- 
Saxon Jurisprudence has received any new 
endowment ! We have only the ancient 
methods. When a controversy arises we 
employ a lawyer — a species of agent which 
flourished in the times of Demosthenes and 
Cicero; he brings the cause before a judge 
— an officer suggested by Jethro to relieve 
the labors of Moses ; who summons a jury — 
as ordained by Alfred. We have statutes — 
so had the Medes and Persians ; and codes 
— so had Justinian; and a common law — 
so had the Saxons. What is older than our 
courts, our trials, our prisons? Trial by 
jury — a device ten centuries old — is the 
most modern of all the important means 
and instruments with which Jurisprudence 
does her work. All we can say for her in 
the century now closing is that, with her 
antique tools, " she hath done what she 
could." 



XVI. 

HUMANITARIAN PROGRESS. 



THE spirit of humanity belongs to all 
races, and has been stimulated by many 
of the religions of mankind. 

It has attained its highest development 
and greatest power under Christianity ; and 
so imbued is modern society with its silent 
influences, that even those who deny the su- 
pernatural origin of the Christian religion, 
and who reject its doctrines, are often filled 
with the spirit which it has especially culti- 
vated in the world. The history of this re- 
public has beeu no exception to this silent 
and powerful working of the Christian faith. 
Both through its organized forms, and even 
as effectively through external agencies in- 
spired by its spirit, through literature and 
law and associations for reform and charity, 
this divine impulse has been slowly over- 
coming in our history the instinct of selfish- 
ness, the indifference to human ills, the ig- 
norant pride of race, and the hardness and 
cruelty which have come down from ages 
of barbarism. In no nation has this spirit, 
which has been spread abroad in the world 
by Christ, had such power as in this ; and 
yet we seem to be but just touched by its 
civilizing influences, and scarcely yet to 
have emerged from the savagery and inhu- 
manity of barbarous times. 

Many dreadful abuses and cruel evils yet 
exist. Still the whole opinion and feeling 
of the day are against them ; much ability 
and labor are expended to diminish these 
ills or remove their sources ; and the path 
of true progress and reform has been steadi- 
ly entered upon. Another centennial will 
probably see Christianity enthroned in this 
country, in custom aud law and institution, 
as it has never yet been in modern days; 
and the spirit of humanity, guided by rea- 
son and culture, governing more human be- 
ings, in their relations to the great evils of 
mankind, than were ever witnessed before. 

This sketch being necessarily brief, the 
writer has been obliged to choose certain 
distinct fields where the progress in the 
spirit of humanity can be clearly tested; 



such as the treatment of prisoners ; the pen- 
alties and enactments against crime ; the 
punishment of debtors, and the legislation 
in regard to them ; the treatment of crimi- 
nal and neglected youth, and the care of the 
insane poor. Great departments of the sub- 
ject, such as the emancipation of the slaves, 
together with the sanitary labors of the civ- 
il war, could only be alluded to. 

THE PRISONS. 

One of the tests of the progress of the race 
iu humanity and civilization is its treatment 
of criminals aud the large and varied class 
of unfortunates. The infliction of severe 
and bloody punishment for comparatively 
slight offenses, the use of degrading and 
brutalizing penalties, the treatment of of- 
fenders against the law as if they were an 
irreclaimable and distinct class of the com- 
munity, aud the neglect of the elements of 
hope aud reform in the management of crim- 
inals, are all being gradually left behind, as 
relics of barbarism, by Christian nations in 
their onward progress. The true indica- 
tions of advance in the spirit of humanity 
are not in any false and sentimental views 
of punishment and its object. The crimi- 
nal has violated human law, and, in the in- 
terest of social security, must be deterred 
himself from committing the offense again, 
aud through his punishment must deter oth- 
ers. But it is equally for the interest of so- 
ciety, and a duty of humanity and religion, 
that he should not finish his period of penal- 
ty worse than he began it. It is quite pos- 
sible that he may not be worse, morally, 
than many whose offenses have not beeu de- 
tected or whose temptations have not been 
so great. But human law can not regard 
this : it must treat his violation of it as an 
offense, and inflict a "deterrent" penalty. 
But here humanity and sound policy can 
suggest modes and modifications of punish- 
ment which may bring with them improve- 
ment on the part of the prisoner, aud which 
will at least prevent him from becoming 



MANAGEMENT OF CRIMINALS. 



455 



worse, aud thus injuring society more in the 
future than he has done in the past. 

Wisdom in this matter of punishment will 
naturally suggest that offenses which are 
caused by pure misfortune, or which are 
technical in their nature, should not be pun- 
ished as are immoral actions. The debtor 
should not suffer the same penalty as the 
thief, aud certainly should not share the 
same cell. The smuggler or the uninten- 
tional violator of revenue laws is not to be 
treated as the robber or the forger. 

Classification of prisoners is one of the 
first elements in true progress in the science 
of punishmeut. The innocent — such as wit- 
nesses or persons arrested on suspicion — 
should not be imprisoned with the guilty ; 
the young should be separated from the old, 
the recent offender from the experienced and 
hardened convict, woman from man, and each 
similar grade of prisoners as much as possi- 
ble be kept together. It is of vital impor- 
tance that the young criminal should not 
learn in the jails new lessons of crime; and 
that the old should not grow worse by vile 
associations. 

The weakness at the foundation of crimi- 
nal life is the want of habit of continuous 
labor. It becomes, then, of the utmost con- 
sequence that the convict should be trained 
to constant and steady industry. Occupa- 
tion in the prison will fit him for a better 
life outside, aud, at the same time, will pay 
the expenses of his support. No offender of 
civil law ought to be a burden on his fellow- 
citizens. 

But the prison life has the same principles 
at its basis as life outside. There can be no 
reform without the element of hope. The 
convict needs, in order to elevate him, the 
same forces which work upon society gener- 
ally : the prospect of reward, the approval 
of the worthy, and a certain liberty of action 
bringing either penalty or profit, according 
to his self-control, or feebleness of principle. 
There must be, then, in a real advance in 
the treatment of offenders against the law, a 
system which would first show the prisoner 
the magnitude of his offense, and give him 
time aud cause for sober reflection, which 
would have the severe and deterrent effects 
of punishment ; he must have terms of soli- 
tude and idleness. Then he must gradually 
be admitted to a higher stage of prison life, 



where work is offered him as a relief from 
idleness. Here he begins to see a reward 
from labor and good conduct, both in the 
proportion of his wages allowed him, and in 
the commutation of his punishment which 
they will bring. He has all the time, to a 
large degree, his future in his hands ; he can 
cause his own penalty to be light or severe. 
A failure of self-control, a neglect of indus- 
try, will lengthen his imprisonment, and di- 
minish the wages he would carry forth at his 
release. 

Finally, strengthened thus by years of 
hard labor and virtuous conduct, he is ad- 
mitted, in his final term, to a greater free- 
dom of action, which will prepare him for 
his life in the world ; in which a failure of 
principle will cause him to serve the full 
term of years to which he had been sen- 
tenced. 

Under such an improved prison -system, 
there will be both solitary and cellular im- 
prisonment and congregated labor ; there 
will be the influences of secular-school aud 
Sunday religious teaching, of lessons aud li- 
braries. The cells will be clean and healthy ; 
no brutalizing puuishments of tread-mill and 
cat will be permitted ; penalties will be the 
deprivation of what has been gained, or, at 
the worst, solitary confinement. The convict 
will come forth, not imbittered against so- 
ciety, nor depraved by bad association, nor 
weak through long dependence on others. 
He starts on a vantage-ground as he leaves 
the prison; he has learned habits of indus- 
try and self-control, he has been approved 
by the prison authorities, aud has perhaps 
regaiued his rights of citizenship ; he has 
saved money, and has felt the power of re- 
ligion, and his mind has been awakened by 
instruction and kuowledge. He will not 
easily fall again. 

This ideal prison-system, set forth in so re- 
markable a manner by Edward Livingston, 1 
fifty years since, is the high-water mark in 
the tide of human thought thus far on this 
subject. How far has this nation approach- 
ed it in a hundred years, aud from what 
beginnings in the management of criminals 
has it advanced ? 

1 Livingston's Code of Criminal Reform (published 
in 1S33) contains, fifty years before their adoption, the 
best ideas of this generation on prison reform. The 
Crofton system is there in its essential features. 



456 



HUMANITARIAN PROGRESS. 



OVERCROWDING OF FORMER PRISONS. 

The accounts of the crowding of convicts 
in the various prisons and jails of the coun- 
try during the first fifty years of our history 
as a republic are distressing in the extreme. 
It is stated on the best authority 1 that the 
average number of prisoners, from 1776 to 
1826, confined in each cell at night in the 
penitentiaries of New Hampshire and Ver- 
mont was from 2 to 6; in those of Massa- 
chusetts, 4 to 6; of Connecticut, 15 to 32 ; in 
New York City, 12 ; in New Jersey, 10 to 12 ; 
in Maryland, 7 to 10 ; and in Pennsylvania, 
worst of all, from 29 to 31. In the Phila- 
delphia prison the cells only measured 18 
feet by 20, so that each convict at night 
" had only a space as large as a coffin," or 
about 6 feet by 2. In the Massachusetts 
_ prisons the cells were so narrow, that the 
prisoners were often lodged by swinging 
hammocks, one over the other ; and in one 
Connecticut pi'ison it is related that during 
the hot weather of July, 1825, 32 convicts 
were confined in a basement under 7 feet in 
height and only 21 feet by 10, the only ven- 
tilation being one small wiudow anthan ori- 
fice over the door. 

During more than fifty years (fromM773 
to 1827) the enlightened State of Connecti- 
cut had an under -ground prison in an old 
mining-pit on the hills near Simsbury, which 
surpassed in horrors all that is known of 
European or American prisons. 

The passage to the " New-gate Prison," as 
it was called, was down, a shaft by means 
of a ladder, to some caverns in the sides of 
the hill. Here rooms were built of boards 
for the convicts, and heaps of straw formed 
their beds. "The horrid gloom of these 
dungeons can be realized only by those who 
pass among its solitary windings. The im- 
penetrable vastness supporting the awful 
mass above, impending as if ready to crush 
oue to atoms ; the dripping waters, trick- 
ling like tears from its sides ; the unearthly 
echoes — all conspire to strike the beholders 
aghast with amazement and horror." 2 

Here from thirty to one hundred prison- 
ers were crowded together at night, their 
feet fastened to bars of iron, and chains 

1 Report of Boston Prison Discipline Society for 1826. 

2 A Hixlory of the Xew-gate Prison, by R. H. Phelps, 
East Granby, Conn., 1844. 



about their necks attached to beams above. 
The caves reeked with filth, occasioning in- 
cessant contagious fevers. The prison was 
the scene of constant outbreaks, and the 
most cruel and degrading punishments fail- 
ed to reform the convicts. " The system," 
says the writer quoted above, "was very 
well suited to make men into devils, but 
could never make devils into men." The 
prisoners educated one another in crime. 
" Their midnight revels were often like the 
howling in a pandemonium of tigers, banish- 
ing sleep and forbidding rest!" 

Nearly all the county jails had what were 
called "dungeons," or cells not fit for human 
beings, in which convicts were confined. 

At Northampton, Massachusetts, a dun- 
geon is described, only four feet high, with- 
out window or chimney, the only ventilation 
being through the privy-vault and two ori- 
fices in the wall. In Worcester, a similar 
cell was only three feet high and eleven feet 
square, without window or orifice, the air 
entering through the vault and through the 
cracks in the door. This was connected 
with a similar room for lunatics. At Con- 
cord was a. cell of like construction ; and in 
Schenectady, New York, it is related that 
three men confined a few hours in such a 
dmigeon were found lifeless, though after- 
ward >they were revived. 

Worse even 'than the overcrowding was 
the indiscriminate association, iu the Ameri- 
can prisons, of all ages, classes, and sexes. 
Of the Philadelphia Walnut-street Prison 
it was said, "Its crowded night-rooms, un- 
disciplined throng, enormous expense, dread- 
ful mortality ; its issues of highway robbers, 
incendiaries, and thieves, as proved by its 
recommitments, are believed not to be sur- 
passed in the United States." 1 

Of the old Market - street Prison in the 
same city, Mr. Vaux says, " All ages and sex- 
es are mingled: the trembling novice in 
crime, the debtor, the disgusting object of 
popular contempt besmeared with filth from 
the pillory, the unhappy victim of the lash 
streaming with blood from the whipping- 
po8t, the half-naked vagrant, the loathsome 
drunkard, the sick and the condemned crim- 
inal." 

An old report says of the New York Bride- 

1 Report of Boston Prison Discipline Society for 
1S26, p. 77. 



OVERCROWDED PRISONS. 



457 



well, " More to be lamented than its fever 
and mortality is tlie indiscriminate min- 
gling of over two thousand persons annu- 
ally of all ages aud degrees of guilt." The 
French commissioners who visited the pris- 
ons of, this country, MM. Beaumont and De 
Tocqueville, state that in 1834 they saw 
more than fifty untried persons in the same 
room with old offenders, there being u6 bed, 
chair, or plank in the cell, and no means of 
obtaining pure air. A common custom in 
the prison was what was called " blanket- 
ing a stranger;" that is, the new-comer was 
tossed in a blanket by the older ruffians un- 
til he parted with all his superfluous cloth- 
ing, to be used in exchange for liquor. 

Of the Leverett- street Jail, Boston, it is 
stated, in 1831, that over one thousand debt- 
ors were confined in the same crowded 
night-rooms with over a thousand criminals 
and vagrants. Men and women, old men 
aud black boys, idiots, lunatics, aud drunk- 
ards, all mingled together in two buildings. 
No restraint was used to\^>revent gambling, 
lascivious conversation, or quarreling. 

It is said in regard to the old prison in 
Connecticut, that if the prisoners themselves 
had been permitted to build the prison with 
the greatest facilities for the concealment of 
crime and the least possibility of detection, 
they could not have succeeded better. 

Of the State -prison in New, York City, 
the French commissioners report that the 
prisoners, when the cells were'unlocked in 
the morning, flocked confusedly into the 
yard, and, at the sound of the bell for meals, 
they moved like an undisciplined mob to the 
mess-room. 

The New York Society for the "Prevention 
of Pauperism" states in fits second report, 
1820, that " in Bellevue Prison, New York, 
more than three hundred wretches of all 
ages, and graduating in crime, are placed in 
a community by themselves, often without 
employment, without instruction, without 
admonition or advice, to become the sub- 
jects of reformation." Girls from ten to 
eighteen years of age were confined here in 
the same cell with old prostitutes. "Why," 
says the report, " this melancholy spectacle 
of female wretchedness has claimed no more 
attention and excited no more sympathy in 
a city like ours, we can not say. Why no 
female messengers have entered this gloomy 



abode of guilt and despair like angels of 
mercy, is a matter of deep reflection aud re- 
gret !" 

In 1828, it is stated that the convicts in 
Bellevue Penitentiary were so crowded in 
the night-rooms that they could not lie down 
on the floor without mingling their limbs in 
one solid mass. The natural results were 
repeated attacks of terrible jail-fevers. 

Iu the old prisons of Philadelphia, partic- 
ularly in the one on the corner of High and 
Third streets, it is stated that, in 1837, wom- 
en caused their own imprisonment for ficti- 
tious debts, iu order to join iu the orgies of 
the jail.. Intoxicating liquors were bought 
and sold at the bar kept by one of the prison 
officials ; acquitted prisoners were kept there 
for jail fees ; the custom of " garnish" pre- 
vailed, whereby a new prisoner was stripped 
of his clothing, which was held by 'the other 
convicts till the man redeemed it by " drink- 
money." No instruction or religious teach- 
ing was known there. It is related that the 
first clergyman, the Rev. Dr. Rogers, who 
was admitted there to preach, obtained en- 
trance with the greatest difficulty. There 
was supposed to be danger of a riot aud a 
combined escape of the prisoners. He was, 
however, finally admitted to a platform at 
the top of steps leading to the prisou-yai'd, 
where a*man stood with a cannon aud a 
lighted match during the preaching of the 
first sermon in that prison. 

Mr. Edward Livingston, the great penal 
reformer of this country, mentions, in 1822, 
that' from fifteen huudred to two thousand 
persons of both sexes were committed to 
prison in each year in New York City, all 
being presumed to be innocent, and the 
large proportion really so, aud were forced 
into association with old criminals, eating, 
drinking, and sleeping in the same rooms 
with them; then, after having learned the 
lessou of crime, they are turned out to prac- 
tice it. 
^ " The innocent stranger, unable to find se- 
curity's joint tenant to the same chamber 
with three-times-couvicted convicts ; vaga- 
bonds sunk iu vice and brutified by intoxi- 
cation, perpetrators of every infamous crime, 
and even with the murderers taken in the 
fact," 

"Women of innocence and virtue are 
sometimes forced, bv this unhallowed ad- 



458 



HUMANITARIAN PROGRESS. 



ministration of justice, into an association 
•with all that is disgusting in female vice, 
with vulgarity and intemperance." 

With regard to Western and Southern 
prisoners, the French commissioners report 
that in 1832 they found in\he Cincinnati 
prison one - half the prisoners loaded with 
irons, and the rest plunged into infected 
dungeons. 

In the prison of New Orleans they found 
men together with hogs, in the midst of all 
odors and nuisances. 

A natural effect of these wretched and 
overcrowded prisons was that they hecame 
schools of crime. Here,were learned the arts 
of making false keys, of counterfeiting coiu 
and bank-paper ; here youth received their 
first lessons in petty thieveries and the prac- 
tice of picking pockets ; here, also, extensive 
combinations for crime were made, among 
the prisoners. 

As a natural result, too, the proportion of 
recommitments was enormously large. In 
tile New York Penitentiary they reached the 
proportion of 50 out of 100 ; in the New York 
City State-prison, 25 out of 10O convicts; in 
the Philadelphia Penitentiary in 1817, and 
in the Massachusetts Penitentiary, there 
were 33 in 100 ; in the Charlestown Prison, 
Massachusetts, there were 30 out of 100 ; in 
the Maryland prison, the recommitments 
are given about 14 in 100 ; in the Walnut- 
street Prison, Philadelphia, 16£ ; in the Con- 
necticut Prison, 25; in the Boston Jail, 16^. 
The present proportion is given as 10 per 
cent, iu the Pennsylvania prisons; 13.44 in 
those of Massachusetts ; in Wisconsin, 5^ ; 
in Ohio, 6^; and in New Hampshire, 5 per 
cent. 

All these figures, however, are to be re- 
ceived with hesitation, on account of the 
loose way in which statistics are made up 
iu our prisons. 

Another frightful effect of these over- 
crowded prisons was their extreme mortal- 
ity. The death rate of the old State-prison 
in New York City from 1805 to 1823 reached 
00 in 1000; in the Richmond Prison, Vir- 
ginia, it was 70 ; and in the Philadelphia 
Old County Prison it attained the extreme 
point in one year of 130, and in six years it 
averaged 00. When it is remembered that 
during the last forty- two years the death 
rate in the Philadelphia prisons has been 



only 17-jSi, and in Massachusetts, during 
four years, 19 T ^, while Auburn has even 
attaiued (1874) 13, and the Alleghany Couuty 
Prison 21 per cent, to 1000, we can judge of 
the sanitary progress made during the last 
oue hundred years. 

IMPRISONMENT OF DEBTORS. 

One of the frightful abuses of the past 
was the mode of imprisonment and treat- 
ment of debtors. It is not, necessarily, an 
evidence of low degree of progress, that per- 
sons who have incurred a money obligation, 
and have been unable or unwilling to dis- 
charge it, should be by legal enactment pun- 
ished ; still, experience has shown that im- 
prisonment of debtors does not in itself tend 
to make the community more honest, and 
seldom aids the creditor in recovering his 
debt. It is a great hardship, moreover, to 
persons who have been unfortunate in busi- 
ness through no fault of their own ; and as 
it was executed in this country, it degraded 
the debtor to a level with the criminal and 
pauper. Even as late as 1829, it was esti- 
mated that there were as many as 3000 of 
these unfortuuate persons confined in the 
prisons of Massachusetts ; 10,000 in New 
York ; 7000 in Pennsylvania ; 3000 iu Mary- 
laud, and a like proportion in other States. 
Iu the Philadelphia prisons of that year, 
there were imprisoned for debts of less than 
one dollar 32 persons ; and in thirty prisons 
of the State, 595 persons were imprisoned for 
debts of between one and five dollars. Many 
of these were honest debtors, who had been 
unable to pay solely through misfortune. 
The proportion of debtors to other prisoners 
was as 5 to 1. 

The Report of the Boston Prison Disci- 
pline Society, page 388, says: "We have 
known of a respectable mechanic imprisoned 
for a debt of five dollars, contracted by his 
family at a grocer's while he was very ill ; 
he was sent to jail, and he was not only with- 
out a shilling, but his family was without 
bread, because ho was not able to work." 
The keeper of the debtors' department of the 
Philadelphia Prison reported, in 1828, 1085 
debtors imprisoned ; their debts amounting 
to $25,409, their expense to the community 
$362,076 ; the amount of the debt recovered 
in jail was ,$295. In 1831, the Gazette of 
that city reported forty debtors imprisoned 



IMPRISONMENT OF DEBTORS. 



459 



for debts amounting to twenty-three dollars 
and forty ceuts. One man was confined thir- 
ty days for a debt of seventy-two cents ; an- 
other, two days for two cents ; another, thir- 
ty-two days for two cents ; seven were con- 
fined one hundred and seventy-two days for 
two dollars and eighty-four cents, and the 
only debt recovered was one of twenty-five 
cents. During fifteen months, five hundred 
and eighty-four persons were confined for 
debts of less than five dollars. In the Arch- 
street Prison, one hundred debtors per month 
were received. No attendants were provided 
for the sick, no medicines, no additional 
nourishment ; none of the prisoners received 
bedding or a supply of clothing. The poor- 
est class slept on the floor. A bed, says the 
same report quoted above, is seldom seen in 
this prison. No provision is made by law for 
either sex, though some 4500 debtors are sen- 
tenced here annually. It is a common re- 
ceptacle for all untried prisoners. Highway 
robbers, murderers, burglars, vagrauts, to- 
gether with those arrested for most petty 
offenses, are here coufined with debtors. 

In New Jersey, food, bedding, and fuel 
were provided for criminals, but "for debt- 
ors, only walls, bars, and bolts." Their pris- 
ons were fearfully filthy and neglected. 
Many of these debts were what were called 
" rum debts ;" that is, they had been incur- 
red for alcoholic liquors with those who had 
tempted them to drink, and had perhaps 
ruined their families. 

In all the States, these unfortunate per- 
sons were thrust into the same prisons with 
the most abandoned offenders against socie- 
ty. The voice of humanity was raised in- 
cessantly against these abuses, and by none 
more than by the members of the Prison 
Discipline Societies of the country. Impris- 
onment for debt was gradually abolished 
throughout the country. 

In New York State, it was abolished in 
1831, except in certain cases where fraud 
was supposed, or in cases of torts, or wrongs 
to the public interest. This arrest was per- 
mitted where the debtor had been a non- 
resident, or where his debts were for moneys 
collected as a public officer, or in any profes- 
sional employment, or in a fiduciary capaci- 
ty; also if the debtor seemed about to re- 
move his property, with intent to defraud. 
He could avoid his imprisonment by paying 



his debt ; by giving security that the debt 
should be paid within sixty days; by giv- 
ing an iuventory of his property, and mak- 
ing an assignment of it for the payment of 
his debts; or by giving a bond that he 
would not remove his property or defraud 
his creditors. If imprisoned, he could pe- 
tition the judge for an assignment of his 
property, and thus secure the benefit of the 
act. No arrest w T as allowed for debts under 
fifty dollars. The same principles in the 
treatment of debtors were adopted in the 
New York Code of 1849. Arrest was forbid- 
den in civil cases, except in actions for in- 
jury to person or character, etc. ; or where 
personal property was concealed or kept out 
of the reach of the sheriff; and also where 
the defendant was guilty of fraud in con- 
tracting the debt, or avoiding the payment 
of it, or in concealing the property. Fe- 
males were exempted from arrest, except 
in an action for willful injury to person 
or character. The law was still further 
amended in 1875, with the intent to em- 
brace cases of embezzlement by public offi- 
cials, and where they seemed about to re- 
move property from the State, or were con- 
cealing property which they had illegally 
acquired. In other respects the principles 
of the law of 1831 were re -affirmed; and 
these are substantially the features of the 
laws against debtors throughout the Union. 
The present law in regard to imprisonment 
for debt in Massachusetts dates from 1857. 

Any person can be arrested upon "mesne" 
processes or execution, upon a claim of not 
less than twenty dollars, exclusive of costs, 
and committed to jail, unless the debtor 
gives bail, or pays the debt. The writ or 
execution must have affidavit of plaintiff 
or his attorney attached, signed by a com- 
missioner, setting forth, in case of an origi- 
nal writ, that the debtor is about to leave 
the State, and, in case of execution, that the 
debtor has property he does not intend to 
apply toward payment of the debt. The 
commissioner will always grant the affida- 
vit on payment of one dollar, and either 
plaintiff or attorney signing it ; the debtor 
is then arrested, and he must go to jail or 
give bail. If he gives bail, which is for thir- 
ty days, he must take the " poor debtor's 
oath," or the bail is liable. He can cite the 
plaintiff or attorney if he has money, and if 



4G0 



HUMANITAEIAN PROGRESS. 



he has not, he must go to jail. If he does 
cite, he cau have a hearing within twenty- 
four hours. It will be observed that the 
presumption or suspicion of fraud is the 
ground for action against the person of the 
debtor. No innocent debtor can remain, 
under this law, long in jail. 

In Kentucky, imprisonment for debt was 
abolished in 1821 ; in Ohio, in 1828 ; in Mary- 
land, in 1830, for debts under thirty dollars; 
in Connecticut, iu 1837. In Alabama, in 1848, 
arrest was permitted, but no imprisonment, 
except on conditions similar to those of New 
York. Iu Louisiana, it was abolished in 
1840 ; in Missouri, in 1845. In fact, the law 
in all the States seemed substantially the 
same : that imprisonment is permitted where 
fraud is reasonably suspected, or in cases of 
torts. 

Under United States law, this punishment 
was finally abolished iu 1839, or made to 
conform to State laws. In 1840, the provis- 
ion against non-resident debtors was struck 
out. 

SEVERITY OF PENALTIES. 

One of the barbarities of the past was the 
extreme severity of the penalties. Progress 
in humanity is not necessarily shown by 
abolishing the death penalty, but this 
should be reserved alone for the extreme 
offense of murder iu the first degree/ 

In Massachusetts, under the early legis- 
lation succeeding the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, ten different crimes were punish- 
ed by death— among them being rape and 
burglary. Fornication was punished with 
fine, and if this was not paid iu twenty-four 
hours, the offender was punished with ten 
stripes of the whip. Blasphemy was pun- 
ished with the pillory ami stripes, even till 
the year 1829. Persons recommitted to prison 
were branded on the arm, at the end of their 
imprisonment, with the words "Massachu- 
setts State-prison." 

Iu Rhode Island and Connecticut, the 
death penalty was also inflicted for ten dif- 
ferent crimes. In Rhode Island, the sentence 
for forgery was exposure in the pillory, a 
piece of the offender's ear to be cut off, and 
branding with the letter C. 

In Delaware, the penalty for pretended 
magical aits was twenty -one stripes. In 
Pennsylvania, iu 1718, twelve crimes re- 
ceived the death penalty, and several others 



on the second convictiou. These, with two 
or three others, remained capital offenses till 
after the Revolution. Iu 1776 twenty crimes 
were liable to the death penalty ; among 
them, high -and petit treason, murder, rob- 
bery,burglary, rape, sodomy, malicious maim- 
ing, manslaughter by stabbing, witchcraft, 
arson, aud the second conviction for any 
crime except larceny ; aud besides these, the 
counterfeiting or passing of counterfeit mon- 
ey, whether bills of credit, gold or silver. 

Iu Virginia and Kentucky, twenty-seven 
offenses were punished by death or maim- 
iug; among them perjury, the destroying or 
concealing of a will, the obtaiuiug of money 
or goods on false pretenses, horse-stealing, 
the stealing of any record or writ of court, 
and the breaking out of jail where the of- 
fender was imprisoned for crimes punishable 
with death. The "benefit of clergy" was 
denied to certain criminals ; as, for iustauce, 
all principals in murder, burglary, or arson, 
to all those convicted of a willful burgla- 
ry of a court-house or public institution ; to 
those sentenced for stealing goods from a 
church, for robbing on the highway or in a 
dwelling-house, and for horse-stealing. In In- 
diana, even iij 1807, horse-stealing, treason, 
murder, and arson were punished with death. 
Burglary, robbery, larceny, hog-stealing, the 
striking of parent or niHster, received the 
penalty of whipping. 

In New York, in 1712, a negro convicted 
of being engaged in the negro plot was 
burned in that city ; another was broken 
upon the wheel ; and another hanged alive. 
Negroes were sometimes burned with green 
wood, to prolong their agony ; at other times 
they were hanged in iron frames, to die of 
starvation, their bodies being devoured by 
birds of pre3 r . In 1733-several negroes were 
burned in that city. Iu 1741 an instance of 
this punishment is recorded. Even in 1822 
the degrading punishment of the tread-mill 
still continued in this State. 

For a long period, one of the well-known 
sights at the head of Broad Street were the 
public whipping- post, pillory, and stocks. 
In almost every village of this couutry, the 
stocks, whippiug-post, aud pillory were to 
be seen. 

Whipping with the "cat," burning, brand- 
ing, and cropping of ears were common pun- 
ishments. The objection to this description 



COUNTY PRISONS. 



461 



of penalties is, it should be remembered, not 
that they give pain, but that they tend to 
degrade and brutalize, not merely the crim- 
inal, but the community who witness them, 
and thus form a soil, as it were, on which 
the same kind of offenses will grow luxuri- 
antly. 

Thus the experience of all civilized coun- 
tries is that the punishment of the "cat" 
for brutal offenses against women tends to 
keep up the class of brutalities. Continent- 
al countries and the United States are main- 
ly free from the horrible brutalities inflicted 
in England by ignorant husbands on wives ; 
it is these countries which have mainly 
abolished corporal punishments. 

COUNTY PRISONS. 

The most crying abuse during our colonial 
history, and in this first century of the na- 
tion's growth, has been the condition of the 
county prisons. In Boston the Leverett- 
street Jail, even in 1835, is described as a 
horrible den of filth and iniquity. The old 
and young were mingled here ; the idle and 
industrious ; the hardened convicts and per- 
sons arrested merely on suspicion, or as wit- 
nesses. There was no ventilation in the 
prison and no cleanliness ; the prisoners 
were under no proper discipline, and moral 
or religious instruction was unknown. 

In Providence, Rhode Island, the prison is 
described as. having broken windows stuffed 
with rags ; the wainscoting dark and filthy, 
with the doors open between the different 
cells, so that there Avas free communication 
between the prisoners. Gambling prevail- 
ed, and liquors were bought and sold in the 
jail. 

In Middlebury, Vermont, the jail contain- 
ed one dungeon ten feet by twelve in dimen- 
sions, without window or orifice, except the 
stove-pipe hole, where the old and young, 
those sentenced and those arrested, were con- 
fined for months. 

In Ohio, in 1840, says the secretary of the 
Prison Discipline Society, "I have seen in the 
prison of the principal town a respectable 
stranger, a debtor, confined in the same cell 
with an insane black woman." He speaks 
even of a/prisoner's feet being frozen by the 
want of proper warmth in the jail. The 
Hamiltou County Jail he describes as having 
no wiudow or fire-place in the cells, light, 



heat, and air entering by the grated doors. 
There were no beds in the jail, and slops 
were emptied only once a week. The build- 
ing was exceedingly unhealthy and filled 
with vermin. No religious instruction was 
known there. 

In Hartford, Connecticut, in 1838, the 
county jail is said to have contained from 
six to ten persons in each cell. Drink was 
freely supplied to the prisoners, and a tavern 
communicated with the prison. The New 
Haven County Jail was oue of similar char- 
acter. The prisoners had free access to liq- 
uor, and both jails became schools of vice 
where many combinations of crime were 
formed. Very few of the county jails of 
this country were superior to these. 

REFORM OF THE PRISON SYSTEM OF THE 
UNITED STATES. 

The great reforms in the prison systems 
of the United States begat) where the abuses 
were the greatest — in the State of Pennsyl- 
vania. In 1786 the first alleviation of the 
severity of punishment was made through 
the Society of Friends, and the efforts of 
the Philadelphia Society for the Alleviat- 
ing the Miseries of Public Prisons. Three 
of the former offenses punishable by death 
were now punished by the forfeiture of the 
real and personal estate of the offender, and 
by confinement at hard labor. By the same 
act all barbarous punishments were abroga- 
ted. Under the former system, the convicts 
of Philadelphia were obliged to perform la- 
bor in the public streets under degrading 
circumstances. These prisoners were call- 
ed "the wheel-barrow men," and were often 
exposed to insult aud ill-treatment by the 
mob. This practice was now done away 
with. In 1788, the Philadelphia Prison So- 
ciety addressed the Legislature, recommend- 
ing more private and solitary labor in the 
prisons. In 1790 all the previous penal laws 
were repealed, and a revised system adopt- 
ed, which provided for a better union of 
punishment and labor. Separate cells were 
authorized for hardened offenders. Crim- 
inals were henceforth to be employed in the 
jail ; the introduction of intoxicating liq- 
uors into the prisons was forbidden. Al- 
ready, ten years previous, in 1780, the la"w 
had passed authorizing the erection of the 
Walnut-street Prison in Philadelphia with 



402 



HUMANITARIAN PROGRESS. 



the principle of seclusion — a great advance 
in the prison system, beyond any thing 
which had heeu known in Europe or Ameri- 
ca. Unfortunately this prison was subse- 
quently so much crowded as somewhat to 
defeat the purposes of the law. 

By the reforms of 1790, labor was to be- 
come a necessary part of the system of pun- 
ishment ; the sexes among the criminals 
were to be separated ; the untried prisoners 
and debtors were to be kept in different 
compartments from those convicted ; suita- 
ble food and clothing were to be supplied, 
jail fees abolished, and secular and religious 
instruction to be provided. The custom of 
"garnish" was forbidden. In 1794, an act 
was passed abolishing the punishment of 
death except for murder in the first degree. 
In the same year an effort was made to in- 
troduce separate confinement into the pris- 
ons of the State. In 1795 further provision 
was made for the classification of prison- 
ers and their employment at hard labor; 
the punishment of whipping was abolished, 
and confinement in cell, with bread and wa- 
ter, for not more than fifteen days, substi- 
tuted. 

In 1803, the erection of the Arch-street Pris- 
on was ordered, which was finished in 1818 ; 
a prison constructed on the improved prin- 
ciples of prison reform. 

In 1814 an allowance was made to debtors 
by law of fourteen cents a day for clothing, 
bedding, fuel, and food. In 1818, an act was 
passed authorizing the erection of the West- 
ern State Penitentiary, and another, in 1821, 
authorizing the Eastern State Penitentiary, 
both on the principle of solitary confinement 
of convicts. The latter prison was finished 
in 1829. 

The system of solitary confinement, though 
now generally held by the prison reformers 
as too severe for the reformation of convicts, 
was a great advance on the promiscuous 
herding of prisoners which prevailed before, 
and was a fitting introduction to the reforms 
of the present day. In other States, similar 
reforms were carried out ; in New Hamp- 
shire, the old and bloody code of 1791 was 
improved in 1812, and revised in 1829; by 
this, burglary, robbery, rape, and arson, which 
had been punished by death, were now pun- 
ished by solitary confinement for not more 
than six months, and hard labor for life. The 



punishment of death except for murder was 
finally abolished in 1837. 

In New York, in 1796, capital punishment 
was abolished for fourteen offenses, and only 
retained for treason and homicide. Whip- 
ping for minor crimes was forbidden. The 
same Legislature forbade the use of the lash 
in the prisons ; but, unfortunately, in 1819, 
this punishment, so easily abused, was re- 
authorized in our State-prisons. No con- 
viction in that State (except of treason) can 
work forfeiture of goods, chattels, or lands. 
As far back as in 1822, the punishment of 
the tread-mill had been given up in New 
York State as barbarous. 

In 1847, a law was passed attempting to 
reform county prisons. Sufficient room was 
required to keep the witnesses from crimi- 
nals separate ; and an entire separation was 
endeavored to be effected between those ar- 
rested aud those convicted, and between 
males aud females. Hard labor was also 
prescribed upon the public works for the 
constant offenders. Each keeper was re- 
quired to have a Bible in every cell. No 
whipping of female prisoners was permitted. 
In 1851, an act passed the Pennsylvania 
Legislature designed to effect sanitary re- 
form in the construction of county prisons. 
In Connecticut, in 1790, the punishment of 
death for burglary, arson, horse-stealing, 
rape, and forgery was replaced by confine- 
ment in Newgate. Cropping and branding 
of criminals were abolished. In Rhode Isl- 
and, in 1838, a mild code, like that of Penn- 
sylvania, was introduced in place of a cruel 
one. 

In Massachusetts, the first improved peni- 
tentiary of the country was probably erect- 
ed — that at Charlestown — in 1805. 

In nearly all the modern prisons of our 
different States the reforms of combined la- 
bor in the day, and separation in the cell at 
night, have been introduced. Strict classi- 
fication so far as possible is the rule. The 
abuses of the old prisons have passed away ; 
discipline, sobriety, industry, aud cleanli- 
ness prevail. The former brutalizing pun- 
ishments within the prison have been mostly 
done away with. The penalties now inflict- 
ed by the keepers are solitary confinement 
in a dark cell, bread and water, the with- 
holding of letters, and the loss of commuta- 
tion. In many of the States the lash is no 



RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 



463 



longer employed, aud in all, except Ken- 
tucky, the power of punishment hy under- 
officials is taken away. 

In the New York prisons alone certain se- 
vere punishments are still permitted. In 
very many of the States the greatest reform 
of the modern prison system has heen intro- 
duced — that of "the commutation" of sen- 
tences ; that is, the convict, hy good conduct 
and industry while in the prison, can reduce 
the term of his sentence hy a specified 
amount, and can earn wages to support him- 
self or his family after he is discharged. In 
1867, in nine States of the Union the convict 
could earn five days per mouth by good con- 
duct. In New York he could diminish his 
sentence from seven and a half to ten days 
per month ; so that if the prisoner were sen- 
tenced for ten years he could shorten his sen- 
tence hy two years and one month ; if for 
twenty years, by five years aud five months. 
All the States testify to the remarkably good 
results of this reform. 

Iu Connecticut, more than 80 per cent, of 
the prisoners had a perfect record of conduct 
for the year. Iu Michigan, for 1864, more 
thau 90 per cent, presented such a record. 
In all except Maine the commutation can be 
forfeited by bad conduct. In Ohio, Wiscon- 
sin, or Illinois, the gaining of a certain num- 
ber of marks by the convict iu his prison 
will enable him to recover his rights of cit- 
izenship. 

As an instance of the highest point which 
our prison system has reached, the Ohio Pen- 
itentiary of Columbus may be taken. In 
this prison the convict may, by good be- 
havior aud diligence, diminish his sentence 
by a period of five days per month, and he 
is permitted to receive an allowance not ex- 
ceeding one-tenth of his earnings. Should 
he violate the rules, he may lose not only all 
the time he has gained in the month aud his 
earnings, but also a portion gained in pre- 
vious months. If his labor is diminished by 
sickness or other causes beyond his control, 
two and a half days commutation are allow- 
ed him in each month. The names, penal- 
ties, and commutations of the prisoners are 
read publicly in the prison. At the eud of 
his time of sentence, if he has gained his full 
commutation, the convict is restored by the 
governor of the State to his rights of cit- 
izenship. JNo cruel or degrading punish- 



ments are employed in this prison; even 
prison clothing is done away with as de- 
grading. Flannel under -clothing is sup- 
plied, and good corn -husk mattresses are 
provided iu each cell. The library of the 
prison is much used; the Sabbath - school 
aud prayer -meeting are constantly attend- 
ed ; while there are two hundred well-con- 
ducted members of the prison church. A 
chapel is now in process of building. 

Without having accurate returns as yet 
of the number reformed, it is believed that 
in no prison in the United States are there 
so few recommitments. Financially, it is 
by far the most successful one. The con- 
victs on their discharge have received the 
following amounts as wages : in 1868, $1872 ; 
in 1869, $2890 ; in 1871, $5598 ; in 1873, $6271. 
Besides earning this extra money for the 
support of their families, the convicts have 
been able to pay not only all the current ex- 
penses of the prison, but the cost of the per- 
manent improvements, and to turn iu a large 
sum of money to the treasury of the State. 
For instance, from 1869 to 1873 the prison 
paid all its own expenses ; paid for perma- 
nent improvements $58,145, and turned into 
the State treasury $38,818. Iu 1873, the 
ordinary expenses were $152,163, while the 
receipts from the labor of the convicts were 
$174,450. 

RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 

In the prisons of the country immediately 
after the Revolution there was no religious 
instruction. As we have seen, the first pas- 
tor who preached in the Philadelphia Peni- 
tentiary had to be supported with a cannon, 
with a lighted match at the side. Even 
fifty years since there was no regular chap- 
lain in any State - prison of the United 
States, and very little religious instruction 
was given. In 1828, more provision was 
made for religious teaching in the prisons 
of New England aud the Middle States. In 
1833, every prison was supplied with Bibles, 
and a Sabbath-school was established in ten 
of the whole number, while fifteen hundred 
convicts received religious instruction. In 
1867, there were regular chaplains in ten 
State - prisons, and stated preaching in five 
others. Ten also enjoyed the benefit of Sab- 
bath - schools, wherein about two thousand 
convicts were tnught by two hundred teach- 



464 



HUMANITARIAN PROGRESS. 



ers. Iu some of the prisons there was daily 
religious service. 

SECULAR TEACHING. 

In New York, schools were first establish- 
ed in the State -prisons in 1822; Sunday- 
schools were opened in the Auburn Prison in 
1826. In 1829, an act was passed by the New 
York Legislature ordering convicts to be 
taught. In 1841, there was secular teach- 
ing in several of our State-prisons. In 1847, 
the law was passed in New York to provide 
teachers for all the State -prisons; other 
States followed this enlightened example. 
In 1848, a society was formed in the Massa- 
chusetts State-prison by the convicts them- 
selves for mutual improvement and debate. 

LIBRARIES. 

The first notice we have of these is in 1802, 
in the regulation of the Kentucky State-pris- 
on in regard to donations of books. One of 
the first prison libraries was formed in Sing 
Sing in 1840. In 1867, there were libraries in 
most of the State-prisons, one in Ohio con- 
taining 3000 volumes, another in Sing Sing 
with 4000. Thirteen prison libraries con- 
tained iu that year 20,413 volumes. A fixed 
sum was appropriated by the Legislatures of 
many States for the purchase of prison libra- 
ries. 

THE TREATMENT OF CRIMINAL AND UNFOR- 
TUNATE CHILDREN. 

Nothing is more characteristic of the bar- 
barous period of society than its utter neg- 
lect of children ; while, on the other hand, 
the highest attainment of social wisdom and 
the realization of Christianity are shown in 
the most watchful care for the young, and 
especially for the children of the unfortu- 
nate and the criminal. The culture of the 
young guards the future of society, and the 
prevention of misery and crime among chil- 
dren is a duty at once of economy and hu- 
manity. 

In no way can society save the vast losses 
it now sustains through pauperism and crim- 
inal offenses so well as by the care and edu- 
cation of the children of the most destitute 
classes. The extent and wisdom of this care 
are the measure of the civilization of a peo- 
ple. The records of our early criminal ad- 
ministration show that children who had 



committed offenses against the law were 
treated precisely like any other criminals; 
and what that treatment was we have suffi- 
ciently indicated in the description of the 
wretched prisons in Philadelphia, New York, 
and Boston during the first fifty years of our 
existence as a natiou. Old and young, crim- 
inals and accused, witnesses and hardened 
offenders, persons of all ages and both sexes, 
were often crowded together iu the day, and 
confined so as to communicate with one an- 
other at night. The young took lessons in 
crime, and the prisons became a nursery of 
criminals. A child once condemned to one 
of these schools of vice came forth, if con- 
fined a sufficient time, a skilled and harden- 
ed young offender. The prison was never 
under this system a place of reform. The 
offenses of children became a crying evil. 
New convicts were being constantly trained. 
And this young country, with all its bound- 
less possibilities for the laboring classes, be- 
came cursed with some of the worst evils of 
old communities, in the increase of the crim- 
inal classes among the young. 

Edward Livingston, in his celebrated es- 
say on A Code of Criminal Reform, speaks 
of au infant of nine years of age being tried 
and executed for murder. And iu another 
passage he describes a boy of eleven in the 
Philadelphia Arch -street Prison awaiting 
trial for felony who had been a year iu a 
New Jersey prison for horse -stealiug, and 
during this period the only lessons he re- 
ceived were the histories related by his fel- 
low-convicts of their exploits. A boy is also 
mentioned who was first committed to a New 
York prison at ten years of age, and, under 
various sentences, was twenty-eight years a 
convict. 

Livingston also gives this testimony to 
the character of previous legislation in re- 
gard to the young. " The provisions of law 
have heretofore pronounced the same punish- 
ment against the first offense of a child that 
they awarded to the veteran in guilt. The 
seducer to crime and the artless victim of 
his corruption were confounded in the same 
penalty ; and that penalty, until lately, was 
here, and in the laud from whence we de- 
rived our jurisprudence still is, death. We 
have substituted imprisonment. * * # For 
the minor offenses affecting property indict- 
ments against children are frequent; and 



TREATMENT OF UNFORTUNATE CHILDREN. 



465 



humanity is equally shocked whether they 
are convicted, or, by the lenity of the jury, 
discharged to complete their education of 
infamy" (A Code of Criminal Reform, p. 60). 
In one of his annual messages, Mayor Cold- 
en, of New York, reports that he had sen- 
tenced youth between twelve and sixteen 
years several times to the penitentiary, from 
which they invariably came out worse than 
they entered. Innumerable facts of this 
kind can be gathered in the early reports 
of the prison associations of New York, Bos- 
ton, and Philadelphia. The first institution 
founded in the country for youth charged 
with crime was the New York House of Ref- 
uge, in 1824. Its influence, especially in its 
earlier years, when but few children were 
iumates, was remarkably reformatory, and 
great numbers of youth were saved then, 
and many others have been since, from lives 
of crime, by its excellent teachings and the 
effect of regular industry. This reformatory 
was soon followed by others in various parts 
of the country. 

How immensely these useful institutions 
have increased may be gathered from the 
following statistics : There were, in 1874, in 
twenty States and one Territory, thirty-four 
of these reformatories for youthful crimi- 
nals; they owned in the aggregate 6153 
acres of laud ; the total estimated value of 
buildings and lauds, with the personal prop- 
erty, was $7,826,480 ; the average number of 
inmates was 8924, and the whole number re- 
ceived since their opening was 91,402, of 
whom 77,678 were boys and 13,724 girls ; the 
whole number of persons engaged in this 
work was 771, and the total annual cost for 
maintenance was $1,358,885, or $152 for each 
inmate. Three - fourths of the inmates, or 
nearly seventy thousand, are reported as 
permanently reformed. These figures, how- 
ever are to be received with great caution, 
as there is no accurate tabulating of the re- 
sults ; and in a country like this, the fort- 
unes of boys in after-life can not be easily 
traced out. 

These useful institutions are an immense 
advance on the prisons which preceded 
them. The youth is no longer confined in 
company with mature criminals ; the young 
alone are placed in the reformatory; the 
sexes also are separated ; and at night, as a 
general practice, there is but one child in 
30 



each cell, or, if in a large dormitory, the chil- 
dren are carefully watched, to prevent evil 
communications. They are all taught useful 
trades, aud have regular day instruction in 
schools, besides religious teaching on the 
Sunday. After their term of sentence has 
expired, or previously, if their good conduct 
permit, they are indentured with worthy and 
respectable farmers and mechanics. Great 
numbers are, no doubt, thus saved to socie- 
ty. Still there is a radical defect in the 
constitution of most of the houses of refuge 
and reformatories throughout the country. 
They are managed, with the exception of 
the Ohio State Reform School and a few oth- 
ers, on the " congregated system," and what- 
ever influence is exerted is on the children 
en masse rather than individually. There is 
too much machiuery, and too little personal 
influence. No criminal child can be thor- 
oughly reformed without a direct and per- 
sonal influence. These large reformatories 
should be broken up, their land and build- 
ings, if possible, sold, and farms purchased 
where small groups of children could be 
placed in separate cottages, under individu- 
al teachers or superintendents. Then each 
child may be reached by personal example, 
with a much greater probability of thorough 
reform. The present system of the houses 
of refuge iu the United States can not be re- 
garded as the highest point to which reform 
among youthful criminals is able to reach 
in this country; and viewed as an indica- 
tion of humanitarian progress, the preven- 
tion of misery and crime among children is 
more important eveu than their reform. 

PREVENTION OF CHILDREN'S CRIMES. 

Owing to the enormous emigration of des- 
titute laboring people from Europe to the 
United States, New York, the port of entry, 
became crowded with masses of exceeding- 
ly poor, ignorant people. As the children 
of these persons grew up, without care or 
instruction, aud often without homes, they 
.formed a singularly miserable and danger- 
ous element in the New York community. 
Hundreds and thousands were known to be 
roving about the streets of the city without 
any lawful occupation, and without any set- 
tled home. They were growing up, natural- 
ly, as vagrants, beggars, petty thieves, and 
prostitutes; the prisous became full of 



466 



HUMANITARIAN PROGRESS. 



them ; the House of Refuge was crowded, 
and the whole public began to feel the dan- 
gers which might arise from these miserable 
youths, and to cousider what could be done 
for their elevation and improvement. The 
first distinct note of alarm was sounded in 
1848, by Captain Matsell, then Chief of Po- 
lice, iu a public report, wherein it was stated 
that over ten thousand of these wretched 
and half-criminal children were wandering 
vagrant through the streets of New York. 
This report was accompanied, or followed, 
by a number of preventive or reformatory 
movements in various parts of the city, 
among which should be noted especially the 
foundation of the two missions in the Five 
Points (1850 and 1852) and the forming of 
the Juvenile Asylum in 1851 ; but more im- 
portant than any or all of these was the 
foundation, in 1853, of one of the most re- 
markable associations for the prevention of 
children's crime and misery that have been 
known in modern times — the Children's Aid 
Society of New York. 

So wide-spread, however, were the crime 
and misfortune among children, that for 
several years but little effect was produced 
upon them by the labors of this association. 
Thus, even in 1859, the number of female 
vagrants committed to prison was 5778, and 
in 1860, 5880 ; and even in 1863, 1133 young 
girls were committed for thieving or petit 
larceny ; in 1863, 403 little girls under fif- 
teen were committed for various offenses. 
Among boys, in 1859, 2829 were committed 
for vagrancy, and 2626 for petit larceny. 
In 1853, the Children's Aid Society began its 
labors, with the formation of one industrial 
school, and the sending-out to homes in the 
country of 207 boys and girls, the expenses 
for this first year being $4191. In 1854, the 
first Newsboys' Lodging-house w T as found- 
ed, at an expense of about $700. This asso- 
ciation has now been in existence twenty- 
three years. The plan and methods of the 
society were peculiar : its great object was 
to save the vagrant, homeless, and semi- 
criminal children of the city by drawing 
them into places of instruction and shelter, 
and then by transferring them to careful- 
ly selected homes in the rural districts. It 
was seen that the condition of this coun- 
try was peculiar, iu an economical point of 
view, there being an almost unlimited de- 



mand here for children's labor, and no neces- 
sity existed for placing homeless and va- 
grant children in asylums or institutions. 
The best of all institutions for a poor child 
is the farmer's home. Here he would be ele- 
vated aud reformed sooner than any where 
else, aud with very little expense to the 
community. 

The effort of the society was, according- 
ly, to draw the poor and vagrant children of 
the city into industrial schools or lodging- 
houses, to instruct and train them there for 
a brief period, and then to forward those 
who w T ere willing to go, or who were with' 
out friends or parents, to places in the coun- 
try. 

The "industrial schools" were also de- 
signed for that large class of children who, 
though having friends and home, are too 
poor and ragged to attend the public schools, 
aud are obliged to be on the streets a part 
of the day engaged in street occupations. 
To these children a simple meal is given ; 
clothing and shoes are distributed to the 
needy ; and industrial branches taught, be- 
sides the common - school branches. The 
" lodging-houses" were contrived with spe- 
cial reference to the wants of the street 
children. Each child paid a certain small 
sum for his maintenance, and received iu re- 
turn simple and substantial meals, a com- 
fortable bed, a pleasant play-room, means of 
cleanliness with hot and cold water, a place 
to deposit his savings and to store his lit- 
tle property, while the only obligations in 
return were neatness and good order, and 
obedience to the rules of the house. A night- 
school was opened in each lodging-house to 
teach common-school branches, and simple 
religious teaching w r as given on the Sunday 
evening. 

The growth and success of this association 
have been truly remarkable. In 1876, the 
society counts twenty - one day industrial 
schools aud thirteen night-schools as found- 
ed by it, where over ten thousand children 
annually are partly fed, clothed, aud in- 
structed. It had founded six lodging-houses 
for boys and one for girls, where in the 
course of the year some 13,000 different 
homeless children were sheltered ; the aver- 
age each night being about 600. A single 
lodging-house, the Newsboys', has contain- 
ed, since it was founded, over 100,000 differ- 



CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY. 



467 



ent boys. The society sent forth to country 
homes over 3000 children during 1875, and 
in all the twenty -three years it had pro- 
vided over 30,000 homeless children with 
homes and work in the country. Besides 
these works of education and charity, it 
had supported a Sea -side Summer Home, 
where some 2000 children during the sum- 
mer had enjoyed a week of recreation and 
country air. Several hundred sick children 
had also been tended and supplied with food 
and medicine through its benevolent agen- 
cy. The total outlay, during twenty-three 
years, for these various benevolent enter- 
prises has reached the large sum of $1,877,569, 
and the receipts during 1874 alone amount- 
ed to $230,604. A single one of its lodg- 
ing-houses had been erected at a cost of 
$200,000. 

The effect upon the increase of crime in 
New York City of these benevolent labors 
for children has been remarkable. 

The commitments of females for "va- 
grancy," a term which includes many of the 
peculiar offenses of girls and women, have 
fallen from 5880 in 1860 to 548 in 1871— the 
latest year to whose reports we have access, 
as no public reports are now issued by the 
Commissioners of Charities and Correction. 
If this class of offenders had increased with 
the population, the number would have 
been, in 1871, over 6700. 

The arrests of female vagrants fell from 
2161 in 1861 to 914 in 1871. The commit- 
ments of young girls for petty thieving fell 
from 1133 in 1860 to 572 in 1871 ; "juvenile 
delinquency," from 240 females in 1860 to 
59 in 1870 : the commitments of female 
young children from 403 in 1863 to 212 in 
1871. Among males, the commitments for 
vagrancy diminished from 2829 in 1859 to 
934 in 1871 : the natural increase would huve 
been 3225; for petty larceny the decrease 
is from 2626 in 1859 to 1978 in 1871 : by 
natural increase, the number would have 
been 2861. The classification of commit- 
ments of lads under fifteen years only be- 
gins in 1864 ; but the decrease is from 1965 
in that year to 1017 in 1871. The arrests 
of pickpockets have diminished from 466 in 
1861 to 313 in 1871. This comparison might 
be followed farther, but enough has been 
shown to prove the distinct effect produced 
upon the growth of juvenile crime by the 



labors of the Children's Aid Society and sim- 
ilar organizations. 

When it is remembered that during the 
period covered by its operations there have 
been the disasters of two business panics 
and a gigantic civil war, with all the de- 
moralization naturally arising from them, 
besides an immense influx into New York 
of poor foreign laboring people, the profound 
influence of such preventive and education- 
al labors upon the criminal classes may be 
partially estimated. In fact, these labors 
may be considered as one of the historical 
landmarks to indicate the gradual but sure 
elevation of the spirit of humanity among 
our people since our century opened. 

While even fifty years since, according to 
Livingston, the practice of this and all civ- 
ilized nations was to punish the criminal or 
vagrant children, as the old offender and 
tramp were punished, by confiniug them, 
without moral influence, among older con- 
victs and rogues, and punishing them with 
extreme severity, at the same time society 
permitting the children of the street to grow 
up half-starved and neglected, to inevitably 
become criminals; now not only does each 
State open reformatories for youthful law- 
breakers, but a large part of the best of the 
community set themselves to work to pre- 
vent crime and misery among children. The 
Children's Aid Society illustrates the higher 
Christian estimate of the duties of society : 
that the fortunate classes can and ought to 
prevent the growth of the pauper and crim- 
inal classes, and that it is the wisest econo- 
my, as well as the highest humanity, to ed- 
ucate and rescue the outcast children and 
youth of large cities. 

Auother remarkable instance of the work- 
ing of the spirit of humanity among our in- 
telligent classes is the formation of commit- 
tees of leading ladies and gentlemen through- 
out this State to inspect and improve pub- 
lic charities. These " State Charities Aid" 
associations have already, in New York State, 
thrown a new spirit of kindness and order 
and improvement into those worst of all 
institutions in modern days, county alms- 
houses. The county jails, however, through- 
out the Union unfortunately remain yet un- 
touched by the spirit of the age, and are as 
bad as they were at the time our indepen<U 
ence was declared. Those useful organiza- 



468 



HUMANITARIAN PROGRESS. 



tions also, State Boards of Charities, have 
in our most populous States brought about 
much -needed reforms. Iu New York State 
they have gradually succeeded in transfer- 
ring all the pauper children in alms-houses 
to orphan asylums or to private families. 
In several States they have removed the 
pauper lunatics, the blind, the deaf and 
dumb, and other unfortunates, from the 
poor-houses each to their appropriate asy- 
lums. This grand reform is one of the 
most encouraging evidences of human prog- 
ress which the country offers. 

TREATMENT OF LUNATICS. 

One of the incomprehensible things to the 
student of humanity, and its progress in the 
spirit of brotherly kindness, is the treatment, 
in all ages and countries, of those unhappy 
persons who are bereft of reason. These 
unfortunate beings could not usually suffer 
more from society if they had committed the 
greatest crimes. The history of this nation 
is no exception to this inhuman and stupid 
practice of dealing with lunatics. Fifty 
years since it was customary to confine these 
sufferers in jails, a custom which still pre- 
vails in many parts of this country. In 1826, 
a young clergyman, rendered insane by over- 
work, was found in the Bridewell Prison of 
New York, herded with ruffians and murder- 
ers. At that time there were in the prisons 
of Massachusetts thirty lunatics. Of one 
who had been in his cell nine years, the re- 
port of the Boston Prison Association says : 
" He had a wreath of rags around his body, 
and another around his neck. This was all 
his clothing. He had no bed, chair, or bench ; 
a heap of filthy straw, like the nest of swine, 
was in the corner. He had built a bird's-nest 
of mud in the iron grate of his den." Oth- 
ers were confined with thieves and murder- 
ers. Of one prison the report says : " It was 
difficult after the door was open, to see them 
[the lunatics] distinctly. The ventilation 
was so incomplete that more than one per- 
son, on entering, vomited. The old straw 
and filthy garments made their insanity 
more hopeless." 

In the Boston House of Correction, it is 
said, were ten insane persons. Two, nearly 
seventy years of age, were in one cell. The 
woman had been there twenty -one years. 
She lay on a heap of straw under a broken 



window. "The snow, in a severe storm, 
was beating through the windows, and lay 
upon the straw round her withered body, 
partly covered by a few filthy and tattered 
garments." The man had been there six 
years, and lay in a similar condition. An- 
other is described who had never left his 
cell but twice in eight years, the door of 
which was not opened for eighteen months, 
his food being furnished by a small orifice in 
the door. There was no fire, and the poor 
creature did not look like a human being. 

In 1834, the message of the Governor of 
New Hampshire stated that in 141 towns of 
the State there were 189 lunatics, of whom 
76 were kept in prison, 25 in private houses, 
and 34 in alms-houses. Seven were report- 
ed as kept in cells or cages, and six in irons. 
" Many of these forsaken beings, during the 
dreadful period of dungeon life, had been 
systematically subject to almost every form 
of privation and suffering." It not unfre- 
quently happened that in the cold and ex- 
posed cells where they were confined, these 
unfortunate creatures were frozen. The 
fate of one who was thus treated in the New 
York prison iu 1826, and died from cold 
and nakedness, aroused a profound feeling 
among the humane. In a New Hampshire 
prison an insane woman was so housed that 
her feet froze, and they had to be amputated, 
and she was restored thus to her friends. 
Another is described as imprisoned so long 
in a low cell that he lost the use of his legs, 
and was obliged to walk on his feet and 
hands ; still another, who had been in easy 
circumstances, was now " fastened in a ken- 
nel like a wild beast." It was estimated 
that, in 1833, there were 2400 lunatics thus 
confined in jails and prisons in the United 
States. They were, however, no worse off 
than the crazed in the county poor-houses, or 
sometimes those under the care of private 
families. Within thirty years, under the 
writer's knowledge, in a Connecticut town, 
was a lunatic woman who lived habitually 
in a hole in the ground under a hay-stack, 
and was fed as an animal would be fed. 

The deepest feeling was aroused among 
the humane by these enormities and suffer- 
ings, and at length asylums for the insane 
were opened in various States. The first of 
these was, undoubtedly, the one at Williams- 
burg, Virginia, in 1773. The present Bloom- 



TREATMENT OF LUNATICS. 



469 



ingdale Asylum, New York, dates its care of 
the insane from the close of the last centu- 
ry, or about 1797. All of these, so far as we 
have record, began their management under 
the modern reform, or the " non-restraint" 
system, never having employed chains and 
cells, and blows and torture, as had so often 
been done in Europe ; yet none of them now 
carry out the non-restraint method so far as 
do the English asylums. 

These asylums were an unmingled bless- 
ing to the unfortunates taken from the pris- 
ons. The report of the Worcester Asylum 
(1834) says: "Many who, in their paroxysms, 
used formerly to lacerate and wound their 
own bodies to a degree that threatened life 
itself, now habitually exercise an ordinary 
degree of prudence in avoiding the common 
causes of annoyance or accident. Not less 
than one hundred of those brought to the 
hospital seemed to regard human beings as 
enemies, and their first impulse was to assail 
them with open or disguised force. Now, 
there are not more than twelve who offer vi- 
olence. Of forty persons who formerly di- 
vested themselves of clothing, even in the 
most inclement season of the year, only eight 
do it now " "The wailings of the de- 
sponding and the ravings of the frantic are 
dispelled. The wide-circling and heart-sick- 
ening variety of horrors exhibited by the in- 
mates when first brought together have been 
greatly reduced in extent and mitigated in 
quality." 

Great as was the reform in removing these 
diseased creatures from the prison to the 
hospital, there still remained a fearful crowd 
of unfortunates in the county poor-houses. 
These institutions have usually no facilities 
for the proper treatment of lunatics. They 
must be imprisoned with the other inmates, 
old and young, criminal and innoceut, or be 
confined in dungeous. The officials are ig- 
norant of the only proper method of dealing 
with the malady, and are often hard and 
cruel in their habits toward the paupers ; 
and if they chance to be humane, they have 
no means, or a proper number of assistants, 
to manage these persons suitably. They can 
not watch and regulate the habits of the in- 
sane (which are often very disgusting), nor 
keep their bodies clean, nor furnish the sim- 
ple comfoi'ts which at once mitigate the vi- 
olence of the disease, or in any way minister 



to the mind as well as the body. They neg- 
lect all this, and usually are almost forced 
to treat the crazed as if he were a dangerous 
and filthy brute. The consequence is that 
the acme of human suffering and of horrors 
is reached in those relics of barbarism — the 
lunatic wards of the county poor-houses. 

There, are innocent but diseased human 
beings treated worse than the most abandon- 
ed criminals. They are whipped, scourged, 
chained, ironed, fastened in cages, and shut 
in close cells, left for years in their filth, na- 
ked, hungry, exposed to bitter cold, taunted 
and jeered at by villainous ruffians, disre- 
garded in their every feeling and wish, half 
fed, their feet often frozen, wallowing in dirt 
and straw, surrounded by a pandemonium 
of paupers and criminals. If women, it oft- 
en happens that they are suffered to be 
tempted and ruined by the ruffians of the 
poor-house, and a hideous progeny begins, 
the offspring of the pauper and the lunatic, 
of the epileptic and the criminal. It is not 
strange that in such places the disease only 
becomes more intense, and there are very 
few cases of recovery. 

Miss Dix's reports in 1844, and Dr. Willard's 
report iu 1865, together with the reports of 
the State Board of Charity, reveal the hor- 
rors of these " dark places of the earth" in 
New York State. In 1868, the New York 
State Board of Charity found that out of 
1528 insane in the county poor-house, 213 
were locked in cells, or chained habitually. 
Dr. Willard reports that iu 1865, in many 
alms-houses, the insane were never washed, 
and that their bodies were in an especially 
filthy and disgusting condition ; their cloth- 
ing was torn and scattered about their cells, 
and that they often lay naked on straw, 
which was wet and unchanged for days. 
The cells had no ventilation, and sometimes 
no means of access to pure air. In many 
towns they were kept in dark dungeons or 
in cages, without shoes or stockings, under 
intense cold, sleeping on heaps of filthy straw. 
There was no place for exercise, none for 
amusement ; the diseased mind was left to 
itself. There was no classification ; old and 
young, virtuous and vicious, male aud fe- 
male, were crowded together. Frequently 
insane females were employed to take care 
of the quarters of male paupers or vaga- 
bonds, with consequences which might have 



470 



HUMANITARIAN PROGRESS. 



been expected. Oat of the 1345 insane in one 
year in the county Louses, it was estimated 
that 345 were able, in part or in whole, to 
support themselves. 

We need not add to the evidence as to the 
condition of the insane in the alms-houses 
of New York State. The same terrible pict- 
ure could be drawn of these unhappy beings 
in all the county houses of the other States. 
But in New York a great reform has begun. 
By an act of Legislature (1865), the insane 
of the county poor-houses were to be trans- 
ferred to State asylums, and supported there 
at the expense of the counties. Probably 
no one legislative measure (except the na- 
tional act of emancipation) ever diffused 
within a limited space so much happiness, 
and lessened so much suffering. 

As a landmark, showing the point to 
which the tide of human feeling and prac- 
tice in this matter has reached in the United 
States, we would speak somewhat in detail 
of the great " Willard Asylum" for the chron- 
ic insane poor of New York, at Ovid, on Sen- 
eca Lake. Here are gathered a thousand 
lunatics, taken from the alms-houses of the 
rural districts of the State, nearly all chron- 
ic and incurable cases. The first patient 
who was brought was a delicate woman, 
heavily ironed, led by three strong " super- 
visors." She had been kept in a cell in a 
state of nudity for some ten years, tearing 
her clothes from her body, very violent, and 
disgustingly dirty. The first step in the 
new treatment was to take off her irons, 
then to give her a warm bath and clothe her 
in decent garments; next she was fed in a 
Christian manner. She had a long, light, 
warm corridor to walk in, if it was winter, 
and pleasaut grounds in summer. At night 
she was placed in a comfortable bed, and 
treated as a mother watches her babe. Soon 
a little work was given to her. The nerv- 
ous irritation of the disease was soothed, the 
miud was somewhat occupied, the body was 
well cared for. If, after an interval, a par- 
oxysm returned and she would tear her 
clothes, a leather muff was the only restraint, 
or a cloth camisole ; or, if very violent, she 
might be fastened to her chair by a strap. 
When we saw this particular patient, she 
was a quiet, decent, iudustrious lunatic, and 
needed no restraint. 

We saw another bright, active young girl 



in a neat attire, who in the county alms- 
house had been kept for years in chains, 
scourged and beaten, having the marks on 
her body of this treatment. The only thing 
which ever quieted her there, she confessed, 
was when " they tied her up by the thumbs 
and flogged her!" In this asylum she was 
one of the best patients. 

A man was shown us who looked calm and 
quite rational, who had been ten years in an 
alms-house, naked and in chains. A Span- 
iard from Dutchess County was pointed out 
who had been kept nineteen years in chains. 
Another, from St. Lawrence County, was 
eight years in a cage, his garments not re- 
moved for weeks, fed like a wild beast, 
flogged, jeered, and gazed at, and finally in 
such a condition that to his diseased mind 
it seemed to him " the people threw in lice 
at me." He was in this confiuement many 
years. Here he was like any other patient. 
We spoke with another man who had been 
shut up for fifteen years in an outhouse (in 
Richmond County) in so narrow a place that 
he had lost the use of his flexor muscles, 
in the midst of indescribable filth. Now, 
though crippled, he could sit at table, and 
was a quiet, inoffensive lunatic. 

Some had lost their toes or feet through 
the exposure to which they had been sub- 
ject. Many were marked with blows; and 
hundreds had been ironed, or chained, or 
caged before they were brought to this 
asylum. Several women were poiuted out 
to me who had been mothers in the alms- 
house. We saw but two or three out of the 
thousand with the restraint even of the 
"muff," and two or three were fastened to 
a chair. They all sit at table, and have 
healthful fare. The bedrooms are clean 
aud well -aired, the corridors warm and 
pleasant, their dress neat and well kept ; 
they have plays and amusements in their 
public room, and attend worship on Sunday. 
Though peculiarly weakened and diseased, 
they perform considerable industrial work. 
The disgusting and fearful habits of insanity 
are to a large degree broken up. So far as 
such people cau do so, they enjoy life, and 
the pains and evils of their disease are less- 
ened. 

The Willard Asylum is one of the mile- 
stones of human progress in this country. 

There are questions, however, connected 



CONCLUSION. 



471 



with the congregating so mauy human be- 
ings in one institution and the reserving 
one asylum for the incurables, as well as the 
degree to which restraint can be dispensed 
with, and labor usefully performed by the 
insane, which we need not here consider. 
The wonderful advance is from the county 
poor-house to the State asylum. 

In reconsidering the various topics in 
which we have endeavored to show the 
steady progress of the American spirit of 
humanity during the century past, we are 
struck with one held where the advance has 
been little or nothing : we mean in the coun- 
ty institutions of the various States for the 
relief of the unfortunate and the punish- 
ment of the criminal. Great reforms, it is 
true, have begun in some of the States, in 
the removal of pauper children, and of the 
insane and idiotic, in alms-houses, to their 
appropriate State asylums. But, on the 
whole, taking the country through, the con- 
dition of the rural jails and of the county 
poor-houses is not essentially changed since 
1800. The greatest abuses and the worst 
instances of inhumanity in the country are 
found in these " institutions." 

The explanation of this singular obstruc- 
tion to humane progress in one field is that, 
in our rural administration, we have follow- 
ed the old English system of decentraliza- 
tion in the public care of the poor, unfortu- 
nate, and criminal, to an excessive degree. 
No small rural community, like a county, 
for instauce, can do justice and observe the 
spirit of humanity in its management of 
those persons who are thrown on its public 
charge. 

The first condition of reform and of hu- 
mane treatment in regard to the "defect- 
ives," the poor and the offenders against 
law, is classification. / But no county has 
the means and appliances for classifying 
public dependents and criminals. No such 
small division can afford to employ the kind 
of officials needed, nor can it carry out any 
method of improvement requiring expense, 
nor are its places of charity and penalty un- 
der much public observation. The conse- 
quences are what we have seen, that the 
county alms-houses and jails become abodes 
of unspeakable misery and degradation. 
The advantages of local administration are 



not to be foregone in many important par- 
ticulars; but these can be retained, while 
the greater benefits from larger manage- 
ment of the pauper and criminal subjects 
may be secured. 

The erection of State work-houses, State 
lunatic and idiotic asylums, State " interme- 
diate or reformatory" prisons, would at once 
drain from the county houses and jails all 
the subjects who are now herded together 
in these places, and who are there degraded 
or injured. With the erection of these State 
institutions should be passed strict laws, re- 
quiring every pauper child of sound mind 
and body to be removed from the alms- 
houses, and placed in private families or or- 
phan asylums, and the transference of the 
other inmates as far as practicable to their 
appropriate State institutions. When this 
is accomplished throughout the Union, a 
new century of improvement will begin for 
some of the most unfortunate and neglected 
members of modern society. 

In reviewing the management of the pris- 
ons and penitentiaries of the country, we 
have beheld a marked advance during the 
century ; and an approach, at least in the 
State of Ohio, to Livingston's great ideal, 
since realized iu the Irish, or Crofton, pris- 
on system. Yet it is but justice to say 
that, on the whole, the progress in this mat- 
ter iu the American Union has not been 
equal to that of Europe. The great evil 
here has been the connection of prison man- 
agement with political and party interests, 
and the consequent appointment of unwor- 
thy and ignorant men to have charge of 
these difficult places of administration. 

The great prison reform of the century, 
the Crofton system, has scarcely as yet been 
introduced into a single prison of the coun- 
try — the State-prison at Columbus, Ohio, be- 
ing the nearest approach to it. The intro- 
duction of "commutation," however, shows 
a great advance. 

One great step in improvement has been 
made by the formation of a National Pris- 
on Association," whereby the methods adopt- 
ed in different States can be compared and 
unity of plan can be introduced. Under the 
influence of the conventions meeting at the 
call of this association many great reforms 
will undoubtedly be carried out during 



472 



HUMANITARIAN PEOGEESS. 



the coming century in our prison manage- 
ment. 

The barbarities of the past ; the imprison- 
ment of debtors with felons ; the use of cruel 
and brutalizing punishments; the herding 
of young and old, male and female, innocent 
and guilty, in common prisons, we have 
mainly abandoned, and we have introduced 
every where the influences of education, in- 
dustry, and religion to work upon the char- 
acters of the convicts. There remains much, 
however, to be done in this field. 

An immense progress has also been made 
in the treatment of the insane, the blind, the 
deaf and dumb, and idiotic. These unfortu- 
nate beings, if not belonging to the pauper 
class, are all now comfortably treated, and 
often much improved, in their appropriate 
asylums. A considerable number of the in- 
sane (though not so large as might be ex- 
pected) are cured and restored to society ; 
the idiotic are much advanced in self-control 
and the use of their faculties ; the blind, if 
not taught to see, are at least so instructed 
that they join steadily in labors for pro- 
duction, and obtain much enjoyment from 
life ; the deaf and dumb are taught to articu- 
late, so as apparently to be able to join in 
the business of the community, or they are 
so highly instructed in sign - language that 
they can form a social community of their 
own of culture, and capable of much social 
enjoyment. 

The greatest practical advance inhumane 
methods during the century has undoubted- 
ly been in the care of the neglected, exposed, 
and criminal youth, as seen in the founda- 
tion of so many reformatories for youth in 
the various States, in the opening of innu- 
merable mission - schools for poor and ig- 
norant children through every part of the 
Union, and in such extended, original, and 
successful labors for the prevention of child- 
ish misery and crime as those of the Chil- 
dren's Aid Society of New York. Nothing 
surpassing these efforts, in their spirit, their 
organization, and their success, can be found 
in any part of the world. 

Did space permit, much should also be 
said of the astonishing labors in behalf of 
the sick and wounded during; the civil war 



of the various State Soldiers' Aid Associa- 
tions, and of the National Sanitary Asso- 
ciation — efforts on a prodigious scale, and 
introducing into modern warfare a new el- 
ement of individual care and watchfulness 
over the health of the soldier, and of in- 
dividual supply of the wants of the wound- 
ed and sick in the armies and hospitals, in 
combination with official and government 
care aud management. 

These remarkable labors have, however, 
been sufficiently described elsewhere. They 
are a striking evidence of the humanitari- 
an progress of the country, and are destined 
to affect the practice and feeling of all na- 
tions in future wars, aud to bring a new in- 
fluence of humanity to soften the passions, 
and lessen the sufferings of these bitter 
struggles. 

The great event of this century in the 
United States, the emancipation of the 
slaves, is undoubtedly, in large part, a result 
of the spirit of humanity, which, under the 
silent influence of Christianity, has gradual- 
ly permeated all nations. But this event is 
so connected with political complications, 
and was so hastened finally by military ne- 
cessities, that it must be regarded as a part 
of the political history of this country, and 
be treated of in that connection. 

This, however, can be said, that but for 
the profound sense of human rights and of 
the brotherhood of humanity which has pen- 
etrated our people, they would never have 
carried their hostility to slavery and its ex- 
tension so far as to risk civil war. It does 
not lessen our respect for their humanity, 
that their wise instinct and foresight saw 
that the future of the republic and the suc- 
cess of this political experiment depended on 
its freedom from this great organized injus- 
tice. Patriotism and humanity impelled to- 
gether ; and being in the struggle, humane 
feeling, as well as sound policy, bid them 
go to the extreme point of entire and forci- 
ble and immediate emancipation. 

The freedom of four millions of human 
beings from slavery, after enormous cost of 
blood and treasure, is the crowning fruit of 
humanitarian development in the United 
States during the past century. 



XVII. 



RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 



f\F the many forces which Lave entered 
^-^ into the development of the United 
States, religion must be regarded as one of 
the first in time, the steadiest in mode, and 
the most potent in quality. If it were pos- 
sible in imagination to eliminate this factor 
from our growth, we should fiud not only 
that the colonization of the Atlantic and 
Gulf belt would have been delayed many 
decades, but that the entire complexion of 
that colonization would have been different, 
the final protest in speech and deed against 
foreign rule would have been later and oth- 
erwise made, and our civilization have re- 
sulted in a poor copy of that of the Western 
tier of European states, and our govern- 
ment iu a servile imitation of either the 
British monarchy or of the Bourbon rule in 
France. " Let processions be made," wrote 
Columbus to the treasurer of Spain, on re- 
turning from the New World, to lay a new 
continent at the feet of his sovereign ; "let 
festivals be celebrated ; let temples be 
adorned with branches and flowers! For 
Christ rejoices ou earth as in heaven, in 
view of the future redemption of souls. Let 
us rejoice, also, for the temporal benefit 
which will result from the discovery, not 
merely to Spain, but to all Christendom." 
Chains and darkness aud hunger were the 
ironical reward which crowned these pious 
aspirations ; while, so far as his own part of 
"all Christendom" was concerned, Spain's 
chief care was far less to enlarge the house- 
hold of heaven than to replenish her treas- 
ury from nnnes in her new continent, and 
yet to sanctify her lust by presenting to 
Pope Alexander VI., as the firstlings of her 
far-off El Dorado, enough gold to furnish a 
solid plating of that metal for the entire 
ceiling of the Roman basilica, Santa Maria 
Maggiore. It is most interesting to ob- 
serve, in our whole colonial development, 
the uufailing presence of the religious in- 
stinct, which, for the first time freed from 
its European shackles, could choose at will 
its own fields, mark out for itself a new 



mission, and proceed upon a higher destiny 
than its previous vision had ever ventured 
to picture as a reasonable possibility for 
what Bunsen calls "the Church of the Fu- 
ture." 

In order to appreciate fully the religious 
element in our first century of national life, 
it will be necessary to take careful note of 
its existence in our colonial life. There is 
no such thing as isolation in history, and 
particularly in American history. 1 Our co- 
lonial and national history are two depart- 
ments of the same organism. They are re- 
lated as foundation and superstructure. The 
Revolution of 1776, far from being an anom- 
aly in the current of American history, or 
an unexpected turn in the affairs of the col- 
onies, was the natural consummation of the 
colonial planting and training, and long 
foreseen by the best statesmen of Europe. 
The tedious ordeal, lasting from Lexington 
to Yorktown, was the natural product of the 
genius and daring of the James River and 
Plymouth colonies. Nothing but a narrow 
oppression could have been expected from 
the house of Hanover, whose sixty-one years 
on the English throne — whither a happy 
accident had translated it from the obscuri- 
ty of the humble palace and trim little gar- 
den of Herrenhausen — had not proved long 
and punitive enough to reveal to it the spir- 
it of The colonists, while only the most stub- 
born and successful resistance could have 
been anticipated from those who suffered 
most from the oppressive policy. The Co- 
lonial, the Revolutionary, and the National 
eras were cast in the same mold, and to- 
gether constitute a beautifully rounded uni- 
ty. They all prove the same great fact of 
the world's readiness for the free conscience 
and free citizenship. When independence 
finally came, there was the opportunity for 
monarchy; but it was rejected as an un- 
worthy prize. It is the lesson which Tal- 
fourd puts on the lips of Ctesiphou : 

1 Shedd, Philosophy of History, p. 14. 



474 



RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 



"Go teach the eagle when in azure heaven 
He upward darts to seize his maddened prey, 
Shivering through the death-circle of its fear, 
To pause and let it 'scape, and thou mayst win 
Man to forego the sparkling round of power, 
When it floats airily within his grasp l" 1 

If we would learn the true character of 
the religious life of the colonies, we must in- 
quire, first of all, into its European anteced- 
ents. 

The period of the settlement of this coun- 
try was singularly identical with that of 
the breaking-up of the old religious life of 
Europe. Indeed, since the Crusades the Old 
World had passed through no such convul- 
sions as shook her whole religious, political, 
intellectual, and social frame-work at the 
time when every nation was sending forth 
her sons — albeit many exiles in the number 
— to establish themselves on the Atlantic 
coast of this continent. It was not from 
any stagnant nation that immigrants came 
to our wooded shores, but from stirred and 
aroused peoples. The political questions 
that arose as a necessary consequence of the 
great Reformation were not adjusted until 
the close of the Thirty Years' War, iu 1648, 
or only twenty-eight years after the landing 
of Plymouth colony. Europe's best blood 
was hot with new aspirations — we might 
better call them inspirations — at the very 
moment when this new field was opened for 
the greatest fulfillment in modern history. 
The Pilgrims who stepped ashore at Plym- 
outh Rqck were men who had been bearing 
no small share of Britain's burdens; and 
while they still retained vivid recollection 
of the disabilities and sufferings consequent 
upon the enforcement of the Act of Uniform- 
ity, theirs was not the regret of idleness and 
despair, but of great unattained privileges. 
And hence those who survived the first win- 
ter, with the new colonists who re-enforced 
their strength, addressed themselves to the 
work before them with all the vigor and ag- 
gressive spirit which have ever since char- 
acterized the sous of New England. They 
possessed the true Roman power of adap- 
tation to every circumstance without com- 
plaint, as expressed by Cicero : " Edi quaB 
potui, non ut volni, sed ut me temporis an- 
gustise coegerunt." The Dutch brought with 
them both the discipline and the indigna- 



1 Ion, p. 58. 



tion that grew naturally from the cold hate 
of Philip II., the barbarous cruelty of Alva, 
and the final triumph of the national spirit 
over both. The Huguenots, whose land had 
been any thing to them but " Fair France," 
came with the great fresh sorrow over friends 
and co-believers who had gone to their cor- 
onation by way of the fagot-pile and the ex- 
ecutioner's block. 

Is it surprising that these fugitives from 
the dragonnades of swift-footed persecution 
should form an important element iu this 
new life ? " Such au element," says Storrs, 
" of population was powerful here, beyoud 
its numbers. Its trained vitality made it 
efficient. It is a familiar fact that of the 
seven presidents of the Continental Con- 
gress, three were of this Huguenot lineage — 
Boudinot, Laurens, and John Jay. Of the 
four commissioners who signed the provis- 
ional treaty at Paris which assured our in- 
dependence, two were of the same number 
— Laurens and Jay. Faueuil, whose hall in 
Bostou has beeu for more than a hundred 
years the rallyiug-place of patriotic enthu- 
siasm, was the sou of a Huguenot. Marion, 
the swamp -fox of Carolina, was another; 
Horry, another; Huger, another. It was a 
Huguenot voice — that of Duch6 — which 
opened with prayer the Continental Con- 
gress. It was a Huguenot hand — that of 
John Laurens — which drew the articles of 
capitulation at Yorktown. Between these 
two terminal acts, the brilliant and faithful 
bravery of the soldier had fouud wider imi- 
tation amoug those of his lineage than had 
the cowardly weakness of the preacher ; and 
two of those who, thirty years after (in 1814), 
signed the treaty of peace at Ghent were 
still of this remarkable stock — James Bay- 
ard and Albert Gallatiu." 1 

The Germans who came hither had set out 
from the hearth -stone of the Reformation, 
and knew as well all the distinctions be- 
tween Augsburg and Geneva as the differ- 
ences between Wittenberg and Rome. The 
Swedish colony started from a land fervid 
enough and just ready to send its king, 
Gustavus Adolphus, to take charge of the 
Protestant forces in their long conflict with 
the troops of Wallenstein and Tilly. In- 
deed, of the eighteen languages spokeu by 

1 The Early -American Spirit, p. 52, 53. 



EARLY RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT. 



475 



the colonists, representing at least ten dif- 
ferent nationalities in the Old World, there 
was not one which had not of late been used 
beyond the Atlantic as the vehicle for the 
discussion of religious and theological ques- 
tions, for scientific investigation, for the 
highest fields of literature, and for natioual 
and international jurisprudence. The cent- 
ury which produced the colonists of our 
country could count among its sons Richard 
Hooker, Chilliugworth, Usher, Laud, and 
Whitgift ; Arminius, Episcopius, Grotius, 
and Vossius ; Hutterus, Gerhard, Osiauder, 
aud Calixtus ; Buxtorf and Casaubon ; Lord 
Bacon, Descartes, and Jacob Bohnie ; Ru- 
bens, Rembraudt, and Murillo ; Galileo, Kep- 
ler, aud Tycho Brahe ; and those two great- 
est names in the British literary pantheon — 
Shakspeare and Milton. 1 It was a century 
of prodigies, and not least among them were 
those cosmopolitan and heroic bauds of col- 
onists which it sent to people aud develop 
the Western hemisphere. There was an ele- 
ment of high moral purpose in them for 
which we search in vain in the colonial 
plantings of Phoenicia, Carthage, aud Rome. 
In fact, the nations themselves, which in the 
seventeenth century furnished scions for the 
new life here, were never, either before or 
since, permitted to produce for distant lands 
men of equally elevated motives, fine intel- 
lect, and far-reaching destiny. 

What Green says of the great character 
of the eight hundred emigrants under John 
Winthrop might really be said of the colo- 
nists as a body: "They were not 'broken 
men,' adventurers, bankrupts, criminals ; or 
simply poor men aud artisans. They were 
in great part men of the professional and 
middle classes ; some of them men of large 
lauded estate ; some zealous clergymen, like 
Cotton, Hooker, and Roger Williams; some 
shrewd London lawyers, or young schol- 
ars from Oxford They desired, in fact, 

' only the best' as sharers in their enter- 
prise ; were driven forth from their father- 
land, not by earthly want, or by the greed 
of gold, or by the lust of adventure, but by 
the fear of God, and the zeal for a godly 
worship." 2 

Of Hooker, Stone, and Cotton, and their 
reception by the Massachusetts Colony, Pal- 

1 Cf. Storrs, The Early American Spirit, p. 42 ff. 

2 Short History of the English People, Am. ed., p. 493. 



frey says : " They were men of eminent ca- 
pacity and sterling character, fit to be con- 
cerned in the founding a state. In all its 
generations of worth and refinement, Boston 
has never seen an assembly more illustrious 
for generous qualities, or for manly culture, 
thau when the magistrates of the young col- 
ony welcomed Cotton and his fellow-voy- 
agers at Winthrop's table." The most of 
the clergymen who came to New England 
had gained celebrity at home, and a large 
number had studied at Cambridge, and par- 
ticularly iu Emanuel College. 1 

But while the element of religion was 
dominant iu the initial idea aud impulse, it 
was not less mighty and pervasive through 
the whole colonial period of one hundred 
and seventy years. The colonial territory 
fell into three distinct sections : 1. The New 
England, or Northern District ; 2. The New 
York, or Central District ; aud 3. The Vir- 
ginia, or Southern District. In each of these, 
though there was difference in the time and 
source of the colony, there was the same 
general recognition of religion. The char- 
ter of the James River Colony established re- 
ligion according to the doctrines and usages 
of the Church of England. The religious 
fermentation was very decided, and eveu our 
present multiplicity is a legacy from the 
mother country. It provokes a smile to 
read an act of the Maryland Assembly, pass- 
ed in 1664, against blasphemy and profan- 
ity, which pronounces against the following 
" motley brood," as Wayleu calls them with 
a degree of relish : " Schismatic, Idolater, 
Puritan, Lutheran, Calvinist, Anabaptist, 
Brownist, Antinomiau, Barrowist, Round- 
head," 2 etc. 

With all our national religious develop- 
ment, we have not yet reached the great alti- 
tude of the humane spirit of one of the pro- 
visions of the first charter of the Virginia 
Colony toward the Indians: "All persons 
shall kindly treat the savage and heathen 
people in those parts, and use all proper 
means to draw them to the true service and 
knowledge of God." 3 As late as 1705 the 
Virginia Assembly decreed three years' im- 
prisonment and many political disabilities 

1 Bibliotheca Sacra, vol. xviii., p. 191. 

2 Ecclesiastical Reminiscences of the United States, 
p. 414. 

3 Stith, History of Virginia, bk. L, p. 40. 



476 



RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 



upon any one who should a second time as- 
sert disbelief in the Trinity and the Script- 
ures. The West India Company, which in 
1640 controlled the settlement of New Am- 
sterdam, was required "to provide good and 
suitable preachers, school-masters, and com- 
forters of the sick ;" and later, after 1664, 
when the English became masters, they en- 
acted that "no person shall be molested, 
fined, or imprisoned, for differing in j udgment 
in matters of religion who professes Chris- 
tianity." 1 Of tbe Dutch, who furnished the 
basis of the settlement, Storrs says: "An 
energetic Christian faith came with them, 
with its Bibles, its ministers, its interpret- 
ing books." 2 The New England Colony was 
grounded in religion, and the administra- 
tion partook largely of that character. The 
people who established it remembered too 
keenly the fires through which they had 
passed to run any unnecessary risks. Hence 
they enacted that no man should have the 
freedom of the colony who was not a mem- 
ber of some church within its limits ; and 
the New Haven Colony said plainly : " Church 
members ouly should be free burgesses." 3 
The "Blue Laws of Connecticut," however, 
are a wretched imposture. The time has 
come when not a child in the land ought to 
be without the information that there never 
did exist such a code. It is a fabrication of 
one Peters, author of a History of Connecticut, 
who fled to London at the beginning of the 
Revolution, and employed his time in as- 
persing the character of the struggling col- 
onists. 4 

The colonization of the Southern terri- 
tory partook of the same general religious 
character with the Central and Northern. 
This may be seen, for example, in the es- 
tablishment of Carolina. In 1662 certain 
noblemen applied to Charles II. for a grant 
on the express ground of " zeal for the prop- 
agation of the Christian faith in a country 
not yet cultivated or planted, and only in- 
habited by some barbarous people, who 

1 Thompson, Church and State in the United States, 
p. 32-40 ; Documents of Colonial History (Holland), 
vol. i., p. 123; Historical Society's Collection, vol. i., 
p. 332. 

2 Early A merican Spirit, p. 47. 

3 Thompson, Church and State in the United States, 
p. 57, 58. 

4 Compare Kingsley, Historical Discourse, and Hall, 
Puritans and their Principles, p. 17 aud note. 



have no knowledge .of God." And in 1665, 
when there was a new charter, and the for- 
mer guarantees were confirmed, the relig- 
ious element was brought out still more 
into the foreground. It declared that " no 
man shall be permitted to be a freeman of 
Carolina, or to have any estate or habita- 
tion within it, who doth not acknowledge 
God." Still, freedom was granted all faiths : 
" Jews, heathens, and other dissenters from 
the purity of Christian religion may not be 
scared and kept at a distauce from it, but 
by having an opportunity of acquainting 
themselves with the truth and reasonable- 
ness of its doctrines, and the peaceableness 
and inoffensiveness of its professors, may, by 
good usage and persuasion, and all those 
convincing methods of gentleness and meek- 
ness suitable to the rules and design of the 
Gospel, be won over to embrace and un- 
feignedly receive the truth; therefore, any 
seven or more persons agreeing in any re- 
ligion shall constitute a church or profes- 
sion, to which they shall give some name to 
distinguish it from others." 1 

As the Revolutionary struggle approached 
there was a quickening of the free religious 
impulses of the people. The fear that the 
Church of England would be supported by 
the crown in its effort to absorb the New 
England churches, and establish a Protest- 
ant episcopate over all the colonies, "con- 
tributed as much as any other cause," says 
John Adams, " to arouse the attention, not 
only of the inquiring mind, but of the com- 
mon people, and urge them to close think- 
ing on the constitutional authority of Par- 
liament over the colonies." 2 How keenly 
the colonists felt on this subject may be 
seen in the special instruction of the Assem- 
bly of Massachusetts to its agent in Lon- 
don, in 1768 : " The establishment of a Prot- 
estant episcopate in America is very zeal- 
ously contended for" (i.e., by the arbitrary 
party in the British Parliament); "and it 
is very alarming to a people whose fathers, 
from the hardships they suffered under such 
an establishment, were obliged to fly their 
native country into a wilderness in order 

1 Dalcho, Historical Account of the Protestant Epis- 
copal Church of South Carolina, p. 5. In Appendix I. 
to Dalcho, see "The Church Act for Establishment 
of Religious Worship in the Province of Carolina." 

2 Works, vol. x., p. 185. 



RELIGION AND POLITICS IN THE REVOLUTION. 



477 



peaceably to enjoy their privileges — civil 
and religious. We hope in God that such 
an establishment will never take place in 
America ; and we desire you would strenu- 
ously oppose it." 1 

It is not without significance that the 
troops of Great Britain were first fired upon 
by the colonists from a church just forsaken 
of its royalist rector, on the shore of Massa- 
chusetts Bay. " Paul Revere," says Loring, 
"filled with patriotic daring, proposed to 
use a church, just abandoned by a loyal rec- 
tor, as a beacon-light for the patriots just 
about to strike their first blow for freedom. 
How sudden and complete the change ! As 
the representative of royal power in church 
and state steps down, in obedience to the 
dictates of his conscience, the representa- 
tive of a struggling people takes his place, 
and at once, as by a decree of Providence, 
the destiny of this church is changed, and 
its history is immortal. For more than 
half a century it had stood, the emblem of 
a great religious faith ; in an instant it rose 
to a still higher duty, and became the sig- 
nal of an heroic effort to preserve a free con- 
science to the believers, and free citizenship, 
with all its opportunities, to the masses of 
mankind." 

It was natural that the clergy of the 
Church of England should be mostly parti- 
sans of the royal cause ; and yet many of 
them distinguished themselves for fidelity 
to the defense of the Colonies. Of this 
number were Bishop Madison, and Brack- 
en, Belmaine, Buchanan, Jarratt, Griffith, 
Davis, and many others ; while Muhlenburg, 
of Virginia, relinquished his rectorate, be- 
came colonel in the American army, raised 
a regiment from among his own parishion- 
ers, and served through the whole war, re- 
tiring at its close as brigadier - general. 2 
What was done by the clergy of the Church 
of England, in spite of their special and nat- 
ural attachments to the mother country, was 
performed by the clergy of other churches 
on a grander scale, and with more magnifi- 
cent results. 

For ten years previously to the outbreak 
of hostilities, the preachers in a great num- 
ber of the churches spoke from the pul- 

1 Thompson, Church and State in the United States, 
p. 42, 43. 

2 Thatcher, Military Journal, p. 152. 



pit and the platform, in the most positive 
language, concerning the necessity of de- 
fense. Some of the fast - day and thanks- 
giving discourses of the New England cler- 
gy, during the whole struggle, have passed 
into literature as among the strongest spec- 
imens known to men of how thoroughly the 
clerical mind can be identified with a na- 
tional cause. Some of the favorite psalms 
of those days were no poor paraphrases of 
David's metrical imprecations on his foes, 
while the prayers might well be placed in 
the same category with that of the Suabian 
chief who prayed that the God of battles, if 
he did not see that it would be for his glory 
to grant victory to his forces, would at least 
remain neutral for one day. 

The religious condition of the country at 
the beginning of the national era was one 
of great prostratiou. What with the want 
of pastoral care, decay, and destruction of 
the church edifices, the separation of fami- 
lies, and the absorbing character of the po- 
litical issues, the spiritual interests were neg- 
lected to a degree without approach in the 
history of the country from 1735 to the pres- 
ent time. The sufferings of the Church of 
Eugland may be regarded as an index of 
those of all professions. Iu Virginia, where 
this body was strongest, it was almost oblit- 
erated. At the begiuning of the war there 
were ninety-five parishes, oue hundred and 
sixty-four churches and chapels, ninety-one 
clergymen ; but at the close of the war a 
large number of the churches had been de- 
stroyed; twenty -three parishes were ex- 
tinct or forsaken, thirty-four were destitute 
of ministerial supply ; and ouly twenty-eight 
of the clergy were found at their post. 1 

The Presbyterians, Baptists, and Congre- 
gationalists, almost without exception sup- 
porters of the cause of the colonies, were 
treated without compassion by the British 
troops. The Methodists, who had been in 
the country only since 1766, were treated in- 
humanly by petty colonial officers, on the 
alleged ground that Bishop Asbury aud his 
coadjutors were disloyal; until the Mary- 
laud Assembly, convinced of the loyalty of 
the itinerants, permitted them " to exercise 
their functions without taking the oath of 
allegiance." Many churches were burned; 

1 Hawks, Contributions to the Ecclesiastical History 
of Virginia, p. 153, 154. 



478 



KELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 



seats of others were torn up for fuel. A 
large number of the churches, such as those 
at Elizabethtown and Morristown, were used 
for hospitals. During the British occupa- 
tion of New York many of the churches 
were used as stables. The schools were dis- 
continued in most parts of the colonies. 
Many of the colleges, like that of New Jer- 
sey, closed their doors for a time. " Kelig- 
ious institutions," says Gillett, " were para- 
lyzed in their influence, even where they 
were still sustained. Sabbath - desecration 
prevailed to an alarming extent. Infidelity, 
in many quarters, soon acquired a foot-hold. 
The civil character of the war, especially in 
the Southern States, gave it a peculiar feroc- 
ity, and produced a licentiousness of morals 
of which there is scarce a parallel at the 
present day. Municipal laws could not be 
enforced. Civil government was prostrated, 
and society was well-nigh resolved to its 
original elements. 1 

Intemperance increased to an alarming 
degree in consequence of the war. During 
the colonial period the country had been 
comparatively free from it. In the account 
which Belknap gives of an early expedition 
against the Indians, in New Hampshire, he 
says the American forces bad only one pint 
of " strong waters " among them ; a state- 
ment which could hardly be made of any 
subsequent expedition of equal size in Amer- 
ican history. From 1750, the West -India 
trade had introduced increasing quantities 
of rum, which was supposed to furnish spe- 
cial strength in the French and Indian wars 
in the North ; but after the war the use of 
intoxicating liquors steadily increased far 
beyond the ratio of population. In 1792, 
there were 2579 distilleries in the United 
States, and by. 1810 these had multiplied to 
14,141, or an increase of sixfold, while the 
population had increased less than twofold. 
From September, 1791, to the same month, 
1792, there were consumed 11,008,447 gallons 
of wines and distilled spirits, which would 
be two and a half gallons for every human 
being in the young republic. 4 

To all the moral and material decadence 
of domestic origin must be added the influ- 
ence of the French spirit, which was very 



1 History of the Presbyterian Church, vol. i., p. 196. 
a Dorchester, in Zion's Herald, vol. liii., No. 5. 



great, and threatened to overspread the 
country. To France the colonies had been 
indebted for nearly all the European sympa- 
thy which came to their aid. Some of her 
best sons came over to help them fight their 
battles. Paris, where the Encyclopedist 
school was powerful, was the first place 
whither young Americans of culture resort- 
ed after the declaration of peace, and they 
were cordially welcomed to the salons of the 
leaders of society and advanced thought. 
The newspaper press and the higher schools 
in America were the first to exhibit traces 
of the incoming of this new element. The 
effect, however, was transient. The urgent 
demand for evangelization and education in 
the West ; the excitement of the political 
campaigns ; the unsettled relations with 
Great Britain which culminated in the war 
of 1812 ; and especially the great revival 
at the close of the eighteenth century, with 
the whole train of benevolent movements 
which came from it, so diverted public at- 
tention from the French skepticism, that not 
even the conspicuous example of Franklin 
and Jefferson, who had represented the Gov- 
ernment at the French court, had any endur- 
ing force. 

How thoroughly religion entered into the 
new national life, and re-asserted its divine 
prerogatives at every stage of our history, 
may be seen primarily in the religious-civil 
relations. As the colonial period had been 
marked so distinctly, from its beginning to 
its close, by the presence of religious mo- 
tives; and as the provincial government 
constantly legislated, sometimes even to 
pettiness, on the relations of religion to the 
civil life, it followed as a necessity that one 
of the problems for the country to solve 
would be the attitude of the state toward 
the church. Here was a realm where 
America was without teachers. In educa- 
tion, government, literature, nay, in every 
thing else, the Old World furnished abun- 
dant lessons ; but when the question of re- 
ligion in relation to the civil law confront- 
ed the people, they looked in vain for ex- 
ample and instruction. Was not " the his- 
tory of the colonization of the country," as 
Bancroft says, " the history of the crimes of 
Europe ?"' The state churches of the Old 

1 History of the United States, vol. ii., p. 251. 



ECCLESIASTICAL INDEPENDENCE. 



479 



World had been the growth of over four- 
teen centuries, and not since the reign of 
Constantine had the history of civilized na- 
tions furnished a positive example of how a 
great people can have religion without mak- 
ing it the foster-child, if not the bondmaid, 
of the government. But the lessons learn- 
ed by the colonists in the lauds of their na- 
tivity had struck too deeply to be without 
avail when their children should begin the 
sublime work of rearing a government for 
themselves. 

To these memories, frequently rehearsed 
and still fresb, must be attributed the avoid- 
ance of all mention of religious preference 
in the Constitution of the United States : 
" Congress shall make no law respecting an 
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the 
free exercise thereof." Tbere must be noth- 
ing — so said the great framers of our writ- 
ten law — which shall remind us of the pit 
wheuce we were dug, or make it possi- 
ble that another be dug into which any 
portion of our posterity shall be thrown. 
Hence, in the national legislation there was 
left large liberty for the conscience aud 
faith of the private citizen. But the traces 
of the rigid colonial legislation remained a 
long time, and in some cases still continue, 
on the statute-books of the individual 
States. While the government recognized 
no union of church and state, the State 
constitutions had to submit to a gradual 
process of independence in the relations of 
the church to the state. Virginia, the 
stronghold of the Established Church, was 
the first State to declare absolute religious 
freedom. The Legislature of 1784 consider- 
ed two important measures : one to " incor- 
porate all societies of the Christian religion 
which may apply for the same," and the 
other to make a general assessment for the 
support of religion. Although warmly de- 
fended by Patrick Henry, both projects fail- 
ed in the end, and not through the influence 
of Thomas Jefferson, but because of the un- 
wearied protests and petitions of the Pres- 
byterians, Baptists, and Quakers. 1 

In 1785 the Legislature of Virginia adopt- 
ed an act drawn up by Jefferson " for estab- 
lishing religious freedom." The triumph of 
this measure was most gratifying to its au- 

1 Baird, Religion in America, p. 221-223. 



thor, not so much because of the liberty of 
growth to Christianity, but because of its 
total indifference to any faith ; or, in Jeffer- 
son's own words, it comprehended " within 
the mantle of protection the Jew aud the 
Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammed- 
an, the Hindoo and the infidel of every de- 
nomination." 1 Virginia taking the lead in 
the severance of church and state, other 
States followed iu prompt succession. Ma- 
ryland, New York, South Carolina, and the 
New England and other States, erased the 
provisions for the support of the clergy from 
their constitutions. 

With the total abandonment of all civil 
provision for the salary of the clergy began 
the real or positive development of the re- 
ligious life of the people ; and the whole sub- 
sequent history has shown that however 
much of a prophet Cotton Mather may have 
been in some respects, he was a very poor 
one in his vaticination of the straits to which 
preachers would be reduced who might have 
to depend upon voluntary support. " Minis- 
ters of the Gospel would have a poor time 
of it if they must rely on a free contribution 
of the people for their maintenance." But 
while there is not state provision for the 
support of churches or their pastors, the 
religious element is nevertheless positively 
recognized. The constitution of Massachu- 
setts still says, "It is the right as well as 
the duty of all men in society publicly and 
at stated seasons to worship the Supreme 
Being, the great Creator and Preserver of 
the universe All the people of the com- 
monwealth have also a right to, and do, in- 
vest their Legislature with authority to en- 
join upon all the subjects an attendance 
upon the instructions of the public teachers, 
as aforesaid, at stated times and seasons, if 
there be any whose instructions they can 
conscientiously and conveniently attend ;" 
that of New Hampshire, "The people of this 
State have a right to empower, aud do here- 
by fully empower, the Legislature to author- 
ize from time to time the several towns, par- 
ishes, bodies corporate, or religious socie- 
ties within this State to make adequate pro- 
vision, at their own expense, for the support 
and maintenance of public Protestant teach- 
ers of piety, religion, and morality;" that of 

1 Cf. Baird, Religion in America, p. 224, 225. 



480 



RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 



Vermont, "Every sect or denomination of 
Christians ought to ohserve the Sabhath or 
Lord's day, and keep some sort of religious 
worship which to them shall seem most 
agreeable to the revealed will of God ;" that 
of Delaware, " It is the duty of all men fre- 
quently to assemble together for the public 
worship of the Author of the universe, and 
piety and morality, on which the pros- 
perity of communities depends, are thereby 
promoted ;" and that of Ohio, " Religion, 
morality, and knowledge being essential to 
good government, it shall be the duty of the 
General Assembly to pass suitable laws to 
protect every religious denomination in the 
peaceable enjoyment of its own mode of 
public worship and encouraging schools and 
the means of instruction." The constitution 
of Mississippi declares, "No person who de- 
nies the being of a God or a future state of 
rewards and punishments shall hold any of- 
fice in the civil department of this State 

Religion, morality, and knowledge being 
necessary to good government, the preser- 
vation of liberty, and the happiness of man- 
kind, schools, and the means of education 
shall forever be encouraged iu this State ;" 
that of Maryland, " No religious test ought 
ever to be regarded as a qualification for 
any office of profit or trust in this State oth- 
er than a declaration of belief in the exist- 
ence of God ; nor shall the Legislature pre- 
scribe any other oath of office than the oath 
prescribed by this constitution;" and that 
of Tennessee, "No person who denies the 
being of a God or a future state of rewards 
and punishments shall hold any office in the 
civil department of this State." 1 Similar 
expressions can be found in the constitu- 
tions of the several States. With time, what- 
ever is objectionable in such language will 
be rescinded. Thus far in our national his- 
tory, however, such civil sanctions of the 
obligations of religion upon the citizen have 
wrought no evil. 

Our denominational life is almost as much 
outside the ordinary confessional examples 
of the Old World as the relation of the Amer- 
ican Church to the State. In all countries 
where a state church exists there can be no 
such thing as a perfect independence of the 
denominations. One is supreme, while the 

1 Bierbower, "Religion in the State Constitutions," 
New York Independent, January 6, 187C. 



rest must constantly suffer disabilities and 
annoyances. One is called "the church," 
while the rest are " dissenters," or " sects." 
" The < sects' of the Old World," says Dr. H. 
B. Smith, " are the leading churches of the 
New World. Most of our sects came to us 
from Europe, to got rid of state coercion, and 
they have here had free scope. Our Chris- 
tian history is not that of the conversion of 
a new aud civilized nation to the Gospel ; 
but of the transplanting of the Christianity 
of Europe, freed from its local restrictions, 
to a new theatre. It is Europe itself devel- 
oped on a new continent. Our leading de- 
nominations still stand on the substantial 
basis of the confessions of the Protestant 
Refoxraation, many of them adhering to the 
old symbols with a tenacity which is now 
rare in the lands from which they came." 1 
The variety of healthy and vigorous relig- 
ious life in the United States is greater than 
anywhere else in the world. It has grown 
with the nation, aud is to - day one of the 
most beautiful and hopeful features of our 
national development. 

We may take seven of the great Ameri- 
can Protestant bodies, and the Roman Cath- 
olic Church, the foundations of all of which 
were laid in the colonial era, as indicative 
of the variety and power of the religious 
life in the United States. The Protestant 
Episcopal Church dates from the founding 
of the Virginia Colony, in 1607, on James 
River, by Captain John Smith aud other 
members of the Church of England. One 
of the petitioners of the charter granted the 
London Company, on April 10, 1G06, was the 
Rev. John Hunt, a clergyman of the estab- 
lishment ; and this man became a member 
of the colony, and most probably the one 
who saved it from threatening ruin. 2 By 
the year 1G19 there had grown up eleven 
parishes. This church extended in the 
South and throughout the Middle colonies, 
and became by far the most important relig- 
ious body south of New England. It was 
governed during the colonial period by the 
Bishop of London, and its clergy received 
orders only by crossing to London. 

The first step toward the union of the 
churches was taken at a meeting of a few 

1 Theological Review, vol. v. (new series), p. 572. 

2 Hawks, Contributions to the Ecclesiastical History 
of Virginia, p. 17, 18. 



PROTESTANT BODIES. 



481 



clergymen at New Brunswick, New Jersey, 
in May, 1784. Though the immediate object 
was to revive a society which had formerly 
existed iu the colonies for the support of the 
widows and orphans of deceased clergymen, 
provision was made for a later meeting, 
looking toward union of the churches. 1 In 
1785 the first general convention assembled. 
The first American bishops ordained were 
Seabury, in Scotland, in 1784, and White 
and Provoost, iu Lambeth Palace, London, 
in 1787. 2 The Thirty -nine Articles were 
ratified in 1832. The Reformed Episcopal 
Church is a secession from the Protestant 
Episcopal in 1873, under the leadership of 
Bishop Cummins. 

The Congregationalists are the direct ec- 
clesiastical posterity of the Puritan Church. 
The original colony came over from En- 
gland, after a stay of some time in Holland, 
iu 1620 — "a church without a bishop, and 
a state without a king." Their spiritual 
guide in Holland, and even in England be- 
fore leaving for Holland, was John Robin- 
son. He gained great renown in Leyden 
among his co-believers by publicly contend- 
ing against the Anninian Episcopius. Rob- 
inson failed, because of death, to carry out 
his purpose of joining the Pilgrims in Amer- 
ica. 3 Though the Plymouth colonists were 
reduced to one -half their original number 
during the first winter, they were soon re- 

1 Butler, Ecclesiastical History, vol. ii., p. 5S4. The 
Society for the Relief of the Widows and Children of 
the Clergy of the Church of England was first formed 
in South Carolina iu 1762, and later had auxiliaries 
in each province. Compare Dalcho, Historical Ac- 
count of the Protestant Episcopal Church in South Car- 
olina, p. 190 ff. 

8 For interesting details of the visit and ordination 
of White and Provoost, compare White, Memoirs of 
the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States 
of America, Philadelphia, 1820. This is a singularly 
prepared hook, the work proper comprising only for- 
ty -Ave pages, while the appendix (additional state- 
ments and remarks) consists of four hundred and 
twenty-nine pages. But it is in just this appendix 
that the rare value of the work consists, for it em- 
braces matters relating to the early history of the 
Protestant Episcopal Church, and its relations to the 
Church of England to be found nowhere else. 

3 While in Leyden, Robinson connected himself 
with the university, where, as an evidence of the 
public favor he enjoyed, he was so far exempted 
from taxation that he might have, free of town and 
state duties, half a tun of beer every month, and 
about ten gallons of wine every three months.— Ba- 
con, Genesis of the New England Churches, p. 242, and 
note ; Sumner, Memoirs of the Pilgrims at Leyden, p. 
18, 19. 

31 



enforced by men of similar spirit and mo- 
tive, and the church grew rapidly through- 
out the New England colonies. This Puri- 
tan element has been the most aggressive in 
our American national life, and has exerted 
the chief influence in the settlement and 
building-up of the Great West. The chief 
conventions have been those of Cambridge 
(1648), Saybrook (1708), Albany (1852), Bos- 
ton (1865), and Oberlin (1871). At this last 
a permanent organization was formed, to 
meet tricnnially, under the name of " The 
National Council of the Congregational 
Churches of the United States." 

The Reformed Church in America, former- 
ly the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, 
was planted in the colony of the New Neth- 
erlands by tho first Dutch immigrants in 
1623. Five years later a permanent organ- 
ization was effected, and the Rev. Jonas 
Michaelius became the first pastor of the 
church on Manhattan Island. In the latter 
half of the eighteenth century great embar- 
rassment arose from tho use of the Dutch 
language instead of the English, and the 
connection of the American with the home 
church; but an independent organization 
was brought about in 1771, through the la- 
bors of the Rev. Dr. J. H. Livingston. The 
convention held in that year established 
the uew church on a linn basis. In 1822 a 
feeble secession (the True Reformed Dutch 
Church), through Froeligh, took place, on 
the ground of a return to tho original life 
and doctrines of the church. 

The Baptists were among the earliest and 
worthiest settlers iu this country. Their 
first church was founded by Roger Williams 
at Providence, Rhode Island, in 1639. No 
sect was treated with more bitterness dur- 
ing the colonial period than the Baptists. 1 
They were persecuted in nearly all the 
Slales, and enjoyed no freedom except in 
Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. 
They were among the foremost supporters 

1 Bailey, in Trials and Victories of Religious Liberty 
in America, gives some notable instances, p. 14-52. 
Anderson, in his Baptists in the United States, traces 
with great candor and care the remarkable develop- 
ment of the denomination. Curry pays minute atten- 
tion to the early struggles of the Virginia Baptists; see 
his Struggles and Triumphs of Virginia Baptists, Phil- 
adelphia, 18T3. One of the best denominational histo- 
ries published in this country is Backus, Church His- 
tory of New England from 1620 to 1S04. It is of broad- 
er scope than its title would indicate. 



482 



KELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 



of the Revolution, and after the national 
independence, the church commenced a 
career of remarkable progress and honor. 
They are fully entitled to Judge Story's high 
encomium: "The Baptists were early dis- 
tinguished for their advocacy of freedom 
of conscience. In the code of laws estab- 
lished by them in Rhode Island we read, for 
the first time since Christianity ascended 
the throne of the Caesars, the declaration 
that conscience should be free, and men 
should not be punished for worshiping God 
in the way they were persuaded he requires.'' 
They are not only numerous, but worthy 
alike of their numbers and influence. They 
have been distinguished for tlieir evangelist- 
ic and missionary zeal, and are among the 
foremost advocates of education. 1 

The first Lutherans in this country were 
in New York, and their first pastor was the 
Rev. Jacob Fabricius, in 1669. In 1671 their 
first church, a log-hut, was built. A second 
settlement was in Delaware in 1676. The 
first synod was held in 1748. The Luther- 
ans are a vigorous and aggressive religious 
body. They derive their models chiefly from 
the great historical Lutheran Church of Ger- 
many. Unfortunately, the American Lu- 
therans have great diversity in worship. 
They early abandoned some of the distinct- 
ive features of the maternal church in Ger- 
many, such as exorcism, private confession 
and clerical absolution, consubstantiation, 
baptismal regeneration, and the imputation 
of Adam's transgression. 2 Of their diversi- 
ties here, Krauth says : " In the United States 
wider extremes in the mode of worship in 
the Lutheran Church sometimes existed in 
a single locality than could be found in her 
whole communion in other parts of the 
world. This diversity has been deeply la- 
mented, and earnest efforts are making, with 
marked success, to introduce greater uni- 
formity of usage." 

The Presbyterians owe their origin in 
this country to the persecutions in Scotland. 
From 1660 to 1685 three thousand persons of 
Presbyterian faith were transported as slaves 
to the colonies. In 1688 there were many 

1 The proceedings of the National Baptist Educa- 
tional Convention (New York, 1S70 and 1S72) present 
the best discussions on educational topics furnished 
by any denomination in the present century. 

3 Sch mucker, American Lutheran Church, p. 16S ff. ; 
237 ff. 



immigrants, especially in Eastern Pennsyl- 
vania. The first General Assembly, with 
John Rodgers as moderator, was in 1789. 
There was a division of the Presbyterian 
Church in 1838. In 1866 au attempt was 
made to initiate the reunion of the church 
(Old and New schools). The reunion, which 
was finally consummated in 1870, was re- 
garded as a victory of the New School, but 
the prevalent theological tendency of the 
church is that of the Old School. With the 
reverend and revered Dr. Hodge, our great 
theological Nestor, at Princeton, and the pol- 
ished and learned Dr. Shedd in New York, 
no immediate fears need he entertained for 
the crystalline purity of the Calvinistic 
fountains in the United States. 1 The his- 
tory of the Presbyterian Church is a fair re- 
flex of the progress, the stability, and the 
culture of the nation itself. Efforts are now 
being made to unite the Presbyterians of all 
countries into more intimate relations. 

The Reformed Church in the United States, 
formerly the German Reformed Church, arose 
from a body of four hundred German emi- 
grants from the Palatinate, who came to 
Pennsylvania in 1727. The first synod was 
held in Philadelphia in 1747, and consisted 
of thirty-one members, representing a pop- 
ulation of thirty thousand. Its growth has 
been greatly retarded because of the inter- 
nal conflict between the conservative and 
progressive, or High and Low Church, parties 
of the church. An attempt to unite this 
church and the Reformed (Dutch) Church 
in 1872 failed, because the former does not 
regard the Belgic confession and the decrees 
of Dort as standards of faith. 

The first Methodist society in this coun- 
try was formed in New York, in 1766, and 
the first edifice erected in 1768. The period 
of development began with the national in- 
dependence, through the labors of Bishop 
Asbury, who had been sent out from En- 
gland by John Wesley in 1771. The first 
conference was held in 1773, at which time 
there were ten preachers and eleven hundred 
and sixty members in the whole country. 
In 1844 the church divided on the question 



1 On the relation of the Old and New schools, pre- 
viously to reunion, see article on Presbyterian Re- 
union, in American Presbyterian and Theological Re- 
view, p. 624-665. Probably written by Prof. II. B. Smith, 
D.D. 



ROMAN CATHOLICISM. 



483 



of slavery, the Northern portion bearing 
the original name (the Methodist Episcopal 
Church); and the Southern, the Methodist 
Episcopal Church, South. In 1866 the cen- 
tenary of the church was celebrated, when 
contributions amounting to about $8,000,000 
were made, chiefly for educational purposes. 

Of the minor Methodist bodies there are 
two classes : Episcopal and Non-Episcopal. 
1. Episcopal — Colored Methodist Episcopal, 
African Methodist Episcopal, African Meth- 
odist Episcopal Zion, and Evangelical As- 
sociation. 2. Non-Episcopal — the Method- 
ist Church, Methodist Protestant, American 
Wesleyau, Free Methodist, and Primitive 
Methodist. 

The tirst Roman Catholic settlement iu 
this country was the colony of Maryland, 
which had been guaranteed by special char- 
ter to Lord Baltimore (Cheilitis Calvert). 
The first emigration was in 1632, and in 
1634 two hundred emigrants settled at St. 
Mary's. In Louisiana and other Southern 
States, there were important accessions 
through emigration from France. The Jes- 
uit missions along the St. Lawrence and up 
the Mississippi were very important in at- 
tracting people of the same faith. The 
episcopal see of Baltimore was founded in 
1789. The Roman Catholic opposition to 
the Bible in the public schools began in 
1840. Since the war of the Union there has 
been a careful and extensive system of 
proselytism iu force throughout the South. 
The first American cardinal (M'Closkey) was 
consecrated in 1875. 

The chief concern of the Roman Catholics 
in America has been to provide for the pre- 
vention of their members from lapsing into 
Protestantism, to indoctrinate the youug and 
neglected into their faith, and to preserve 
the balance of political power. The spirit 
of the leaders is in sympathy with the ex- 
treme decrees of the Vatican Council. This 
church has made no important impression on 
the literature or thought of the nation, and 
produced no great public benefactors in edu- 
cational or humanitarian life. The follow- 
ing jeremiad, which has just appeared from 
a Roman Catholic source, can hardly be read 
without sympathy ; though as to the causes 
of the fearful failures of this body, there 
will be no difference of opinion among Prot- 
estants : 



" The Catholic influence on the country at 
large, then, and even now, is slight. The 
tactics of parties exclude Catholics almost 
entirely from all higher offices in the coun- 
try. We have had one Catholic among the 
chief -justices of the Supreme Court of the 
United States ; a few, very few, memhers of 
the United States Senate ; scarcely a single 
Cabiuet officer; here and there a Catholic 
reaches the position of governor of a State, 
but too rarely to be noted. The army and 
the navy show many Catholic officers, whose 
record is of the noblest. Iu literature, science, 
and the arts we have made little mark, and 
are behind even the modest position of the 
country at large. At the earliest period, 
Mathew Carey and Robert Walsh occupied 
a higher position in general literature than 
any Catholic does at the present day. Even 
the wonderful ability and depth of Dr. 
Brownson in his Ecric}v, in his "American 
Republic," that should be a classic, and in 
his minor works, have failed to take their 
place among far inferior works, and are sel- 
dom noticed in writing or speech in such a 
way as to show their influence. 

"Archbishop Hughes left no great work 
to take its place in the literature of the coun- 
try, great as was his influence iu life ; and 
the same may be said of Bishop England. 
Archbishop Kenrick, iu his varied learning, 
enriched our Catholic rather than the na- 
tional literature by his Theology, his essay 
on the Primacy of the Apostolic See, and his 
version of the Bible. Archbishop Spalding 
took a more popular tone ; and in lighter 
paths for Catholic readers there are names 
of merit, but few that will make an enduring 
reputation. In the field of history, O'Cal- 
laghau, M'Sherry, Meline, and others have 
indeed won a place by critical research, 
sound judgment, and eloquent narration. 
In poetry, Shea and M'Gee will be remem- 
bered by some of their minor poems which 
found their way to collections ; but we have 
no poet to rank with Longfellow, Bryant, 
and Whittier. Thebaud, in his Irish Race, 
and still more iu his GentiUsm, lays claim to 
a higher position in the more serious school 
of general literature. Still it must be con- 
fessed that, on the whole, we are behind- 
hand. Our college course is, perhaps, too 
elementary ; and Catholics even more than 
their neighbors, perhaps, underrate literary 



484 



RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 



culture, and, in their anxiety to throw their 
sons into the world of business and care, 
deprive some of that learned leisure that is 
needed for great aud enduring work. Amoug 
the clergy the science, learning, aud ability 
that might add laurels to the body are oft- 
en kept unused by the severe toils of mis- 
sionary life or by modest diffidence ; and au 
occasional article in some magazine unno- 
ticed, aud hence unappreciated, alone re- 
veals what might be. 

" It must be admitted, too, that although 
industry, talent, aud probity have brought 
to many Catholics, in professional and mer- 
cantile life, great earthly rewards iu wealth 
and means, these successful men have pro- 
duced few men of such public spirit as we 
behold in the various Protestant denomina- 
tions. Wh'ile every college under Protestant 
influence shows its scholarships, professor- 
ships, special schools, aud libraries estab- 
lished and endowed by individuals, there is 
scarcely a case to be met with of similar 
Catholic liberality. It is still more rare to 
find a church or institution of any kind 
amoug us built or endowed by a wealthy 
Catholic. What has been accomplished 
hitherto has been mainly the work of the 
poor; but the wealthy Catholics seem sadly 
lackiug iu public spirit. Yet the noblest 
monument a mau could erect would be a 
church or an institution. There are monu- 
ments in our cemeteries, mere ornamental 
structures, evidences of family pride, which 
have cost more than would have built a beau- 
tiful church to stand for a century, where 
mass would be said constantly for the found- 
er. Better a hospital for the sick or afflict- 
ed than a palace for the dead ; better some- 
thing Christian than any thing so essential- 
ly pagau." 

The following table presents an approxi- 
mate view of the ecclesiastical strength of 
the country at the time of the Revolution : 



Denominations. 


Ministers. 


Churches. 
300 
380 
700 
300 

60 

60 

60 

20 
8 

52 

111 




250 

350 

575 

140 

25 

25 

25 

13 

12 

26 

20 














Roman Catholics 


1461 


1951 



1 Circuits. 



With a total population of the country at 
the time of the Revolution of 3,000,000, of 
which one -sixth consisted of slaves, and 
1461 ministers aud 1951 church organiza- 
tions, there was one minister of the Gospel 
for every 2053 souls, and one church for ev- 
ery 1538 souls. With our preseut popula- 
tion of 38,558,371, we have one church for 
every 535 souls, and oue minister for every 
757 souls. The rapid increase of church 
property can be seen by a comparison of the 
years 1850 and 1870. In 1850 it amounted 
to $87,328,801 ; but in 1870 it had increased 
to $354,483,581, or an increase iu tweuty 
years of $267,154,780. 

The order of growth of the denomina- 
tions was not anticipated by any of the 
seers, of whom the number was large, at the 
beginning of our national history. Dr. Stiles, 
President of Yale College, grandly prophe- 
sied iu 1783 as follows : "When we look for- 
ward and see this country increased to forty 
or fifty millions, while Ave see all the relig- 
ious sects increased into respectable bodies, 
we shall doubtless find the united body of 
the Congregational aud Presbyterian church- 
es making an equal figure with any two of 
them." The Methodists were uot enumer- 
ated iu any of the religious statistics as 
worthy of note, aud even Baird does uot in- 
clude them iu his table. But the presaging 
Dr. Stiles knew of them, though not enough 
to escape two blunders in his orthography, 
and says, " There are Westleians, Mennon- 
ists, aud others, all of which will make a 
very inconsiderable amount in comparison 
with those who will give the religious com- 
plexion to America." The numerical order 
was as follows, at the beginning of the na- 
tion's first century : " Congregational, Bap- 
tist, Church of England, Presbyterian, Lu- 
theran, German Reformed, Dutch Reformed, 
Roman Catholic." At present it is, "Meth- 
odist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Roman Cath- 
olic, Christian, Lutheran, Congregational, 
Protestant Episcopal." 1 According to sit- 
tings, the order is : Methodist, 6,428,209 ; Bap- 
tist, 3,997,116; Presbyterian, 2,198,900; Ro- 
man Catholic, 1,990,514 ; Congregational, 
1,117,212 ; Protestant Episcopal, 991,051 ; Lu- 
theran, 977,332 ; Christian, 865,602. The or- 
der in church property is : Methodist, Ro- 

1 Diman, North American Review, January, 1876, p. 
22, 23. 



DENOMINATIONAL STATISTICS. 



485 



man Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist, Prot- 
estant Episcopal, Congregational, Lutheran, 
and Reformed Church iu America. 



The following is a table of the respective 
denominations, according to the ceusus of 
1870: 



Denominations. 

Baptist (regular) 

Baptist (other) 

Christian 

Congregational 

Episcopal (Protestant) 

Evangelical Association 

Friends 

Jewish 

Lutheran 

Methodist 

Miscellaneous 

Moravian (Uuitas Fratrum) 

Mormon 

New Jerusalem (Swedenborgian) 

Presbyterian (regular) 

Presbyterian (other) 

Reformed Church in America (late Dutch Reformed) 
Reformed Church iu the United States (late German) 

Reformed) / 

Roman Catholic 

Second Advent 

Shaker 

Spiritualist ■ 

Unitarian 

United Brethren in Christ 

Universalist 

Unknown (Local Missions) 

Unknown (Union) 

Total 



Orfraniza- 


Edifices. 


Sittings. 


Property. 


14,474 


12,S57 


3,997,116 


$39, 229, 'J? 1 


1.355 


1,105 


363,019 


2,378,977 


3.5T8 


2,822 


S65,602 


6,425,137 


2,S87 


2,715 


1,117,212 


25 069,698 


2,835 


2,601 


991,051 


30,514,549 


815 


641 


193,796 


2,301,650 


692 


662 


224,664 


3,939,560 


1S9 


152 


73,265 


5,155,234 


3,032 


2,776 


977,332 


14,917,747 


25,278 


21,337 


6,52S,209 


69,854,121 


27 


17 


6,935 


135,650 


72 


67 


25,700 


709,100 


189 


171 


87,838 


656,750 


90 


61 


18,755 


869.700 


6,262 


5,683 


2,19S,900 


47,828.732 


1,562 


1,388 


499,344 


5,436,524 


471 


468 


227,228 


10,359,255 


1,256 


1,145 


431,700 


5,775,215 


4,127 


3.S06 


1,990,514 


60,985,506 


225 


140 


34,555 


306,240 


18 


IS 


8,850 


86,900 


95 


22 


6,970 


100,150 


331 


310 


155,471 


6,282,675 


1,445 


937 


265,025 


1,819,S10 


719 


602 


210.8S4 


5,692,325 


26 


27 


11,925 


6S7,800 


409 


552 


153,202 


965,295 


72,459 


63,082 


21,665,062 


$354,4S3,5S1 



Among the causes of the remarkable out- 
ward growth of the American Church, we 
must give evangelization the first rank. 
The couutry being new and unsettled, ex- 
cept along the Atlantic coast, and the popu- 
lation drifting westward constantly, the re- 
ligious demands of the people seemed never 
to admit of satisfaction. As fast as a new 
region invited the settler, a great spiritual 
need was perceived by the strong churches 
in the East, and every effort was made to 
relieve it. 

The zeal of the pioneer preachers iu this 
couutry in dealing with the elemeuts of 
nature and hostilities of the aborigines has 
not been surpassed in the history of evan- 
gelization, aud takes equal rank with that 
of Boniface, Columban, Gallns, and Ansgar 
in supplanting Teutonic and Scandinavian 
idolatry with the Gospel of Christ. 

The strain which the emigration from 
the Old World has made upon the New has 
been nowhere felt as in the religious sphere. 
How to assimilate a foreign and varied 
adult population, with its foreign training 
and tastes, was a problem which might well 
tax the energies of the strongest and most 
powerful church iu Christendom. This em- 
igrant tide has never ceased. The uniform 
annual rate from 1784 to 1794 was small — 
only about 4000. In 1794 it suddenly in- 



creased to 10,000; but declined again, and 
never recovered until 1817, when the Euro- 
pean wars were over. 1 From 1820 to 1874 
Great Britain aud Ireland alone have sent 
to this couutry 4,319,048 emigrants, or near- 
ly a million and a half more than the entire 
population of the country at the beginning 
of the national century. The aggregate of 
immigrants from 1783 to 1874 was 9,058,141, 
aud at the last ceusus (1870) one -sixth of 
our eutire population was of foreign birth. 
To provide religious instruction aud schools 
for this vast number of new citizens has 
beeu a burden of great magnitude. Yet it 
has beeu borne with calmness and resolu- 
tion ; and while there has beeu some rest- 
iveness on the part of certain fractious of 
the foreign population against the Sunday 
laws aud other traditional regulations, it 
has never beeu strong enough to change a 
single important feature of the religious life 
of the United States. 

The mining regions in the Far West and 
on the Pacific coast have beeu visited by 
the missionaries of the leading churches, 
and organizations have been established 
wherever secular interests have drawn peo- 
ple together. The most neglected portions 
of the population of the great cities, both iu 

1 Draper, Civil Policy of America, p. 101-103. 



486 



RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 



the East and West, Lave attracted atten- 
tion, aud every care is bestowed upon the 
erriug aud the young among the lowest 
poor. The colored population of the South, 
declared free by the proclamation of Presi- 
dent Lincoln, January 1, 1863, were desti- 
tute of all material aud spiritual care at the 
close of the civil war. 

An act of Congress of March 3, 1865, es- 
tablished the Freedmen's Bureau, which 
provided for the wants of the emancipa- 
ted negroes, and continued in operation un- 
til 1869, when the educational department 
alone remained. This latter continued in 
force until 1870. The total amount con- 
tributed for the education aud support of 
freedmen, down to 1871, was $14,996,480. 
The Indians have likewise come in for their 
share of attention from the churches. They 
number about 350,000. They occupy nine- 
ty reservations, iu eight States and eleven 
Territories, and compose one hundred and 
thirty tribes, speaking as many as fifty dif- 
ferent languages. They have been so far 
placed by President Grant under the super- 
vision of the leadiug churches as to leave to 
the latter the nomination of agents for the 
tribes. All the chief denominations, with 
the Friends and Moravians, have missions 
among the Indians. 

A difference must be observed between 
the case of the freedmen aud Indians and 
the remaining needy portions of our popu- 
lation. Iu those two cases there have been 
material wants of an aggravated character, 
aud the government has taken upon itself 
the burden of their provision ; but iu strict- 
ly spiritual need it has never expended one 
dollar on any class, from the beginning of 
our national era until the present day. And 
it can not do it. Should a single dime be 
taken out of the United States Treasury to 
aid in payment of the salary of the hum- 
blest missiouary iu the land, it would pro- 
voke a protest from one side of the conti- 
nent to the other. 

The revivals that have at various times 
visited the American Church have been at- 
tended by such phenomena, and have pro- 
duced such lasting results, that they must 
be regarded a leading factor in the religious 
life of the people. There has been no peri- 
od of long duration during the entire histo- 
ry of the church, whether Christian or pre- 



Christian, which has not been marked by 
an occasional return to spiritual vitality 
aud power. No two seasons of quickening 
have been distinguished by the same feat- 
ures, or brought to pass through precisely 
similar agencies. The use of the mendicant 
orders ; the preaching of Peter the Hermit 
in behalf of the first Crusade; the eloquence 
of Tauler aud his brother Mystics in Ger- 
many ; the denunciations of Savonarola in 
Florence ; the sermons of Wycliffe in En- 
gland, Huss in Bohemia, and Luther in Sax- 
ony ; the meditations of the Quietists iu 
France, and the restless labors of the Wes- 
leyau itinerants in Britain — were all diverse 
manifestations of the same spirit. No year 
of darkness, even in the depth of the Middle 
Ages, was without its bold voice here aud 
there, demanding a return to Pentecost and 
the warm, new life of the first disciples in 
Jerusalem and Antioch. 

The absence of wealth and social com- 
forts, aud the inability to lean on the civil 
treasury for support, early accustomed the 
American Church to look to its religious life 
as the great basis of its strength. Outpour- 
ings of the Divine Spirit were expected and 
experienced eveu iu the early colonial time, 
and many of the churches multiplied through 
success in revivals. 

There have been four periods of revival in 
the history of the American Church. The 
first was in the colonial era, and began in 
New Jersey in 1731. Even as early as 1630, 
and continuing down to 1660, there had been 
an active and steady religious life in New 
England, which was quickened still more 
by special visitations. Iu 1680 there was a 
revival in Massachusetts, aud one in Con- 
necticut in 1721. But the revival which be- 
gan in 1731 was the first in American histo- 
ry which assumed a general character. By 
the year 1734 it had reached Northampton, 
Massachusetts, and continued down to 1742, 
overspreading all New England, and reach- 
ing through the Middle States down to 
Southern Virginia. The year of its climax 
was 1740. Hence, in religious history, that 
revival is called the " Great Awakening of 
1740." Jonathan Edwards, then pastor in 
Northampton, preached a series of sermons 
on Justification by Faith, and the immedi- 
ate result was a powerful spiritual awaken- 
iug. Many of the members of the church 



GREAT REVIVALS. 



487 



over which Edwards was pastor did riot pro- 
fess regeneration of heart ; for by this time 
the doctrine of " the venerable Stoddard," 
who had been pastor in Northampton, had 
not only affected that single church, but 
many others throughout Massachusetts and 
other New England States. In 1707 Stod- 
dard published a sermou in which he held 
that " sanctification is not a necessary qual- 
ification to partaking the Lord's - supper ;" 
and that "the Lord's-supper is a converting 
ordinance." 1 This view had brought into 
the church many persons who led irreligious 
lives and were destructive of its best in- 
terests. Hence Edwards, seeing this, laid 
stress on justification by faith — the one 
great cure for all spiritual decline. His 
preaching had the immediate effect of a re- 
vival within the pale of the church ; but the 
influence soon extended to the more indif- 
ferent circles. Whitefield arrived in this 
country in 1740, and immediately preached 
to vast audiences. He became a powerful 
promoter of the revival, and made a tour 
through New England and the central col- 
onies. 

While there was a certain degree of lib- 
erty in the evangelistic labors of certain 
preachers, the practice of ministers travel- 
ing from one parish to another, as evangel- 
ists for the promotion of revivals, aroused 
very bitter opposition in some sections. In 
1741 the Consociation of Guilford, Connecti- 
cut, declared against it, and in 1742 the 
Legislature of the same State enacted laws 
against it, with heavy penalties in case of 
violation. No less a character than Sam- 
uel Finley, afterward President of Princeton 
College, was dealt with as a vagrant, and 
sent from one constable to another, out of 
the bounds of the colony. 2 With Edwards 
and Whitefield, as leading agents in the re- 
vival, must be mentioned the Tennents (Gil- 
bert and William), Bellamy, Griswold, Cros- 
well, Parsons, Wheelock, Robinson, Blair, 
and Roan. 3 As results of the revival, from 

1 Tracy, The Great Awakening, p. 4, 5. 

- Uhden, New England Theocracy, p. 275. 

3 The literature of this first great religions awaken- 
ing in American history is abundant. The best source 
is Prince, The Christian History; containing Accounts 
of the Revival and Propagation in Great Britain and 
America. This work first appeared as a weekly serial, 
in small octavo, eight pages, the first number being 
issued March 5, 1743. It continued two years. Thom- 
as Prince, Jun., who conducted it, was the son of one 



twenty -five thousand to thirty thousand 
converts were added to the New England 
churches ; twenty ministers, near Boston 
alone, ascribed their conversion to White- 
field ; and from 1740 to 1760 not less than 
one hundred and fifty new churches were 
organized. 1 After the year 1750 there was 
a gradual disappearance of revival influ- 
ences, and the churches returned to their 
wonted condition. It was not long before 
there appeared proofs of spiritual declension 
owing to many causes, but chiefly to the 
churches that arose in opposition to the re- 
vival tendencies, to the civil troubles occa- 
sioned by the old French wars from 1756 to 
1763, to the threatening Revolution, then to 
the long conflict itself with England, and, 
last, to the absorbing political questions in- 
cidental to the establishment of independ- 
ence and our relations to foreign powers. 2 

There now began the second revival peri- 
od, 1792-1808. New England was the prin- 
cipal scene. All classes of people were per- 
vaded by it. Dr. Griffin, of Connecticut, says : 
"From that date [1792] I saw a continued 
succession of heaveuly spriukliugs, until I 
could stand at my door in New Hartford, 
and number fifty or sixty congregations laid 
down in oue field of divine wonders." This 
revival, like that in which Edwards and his 
coadjutors were the principal ageuts, result- 
ed from the vigorous preaching of the great 
doctrines of Christianity, such as repent- 
ance, faith, the judgment -day, and eternal 
rewards and punishments. The day of 

of the pastors of the Old South Church, Boston, and 
his facilities for information were very abundant- 
Gillies, Historical Collections (Bonar's edition, Kelso, 
1S45, is the best), furnishes, besides copious extracts 
from Prince, very valuable details. The work of Gil- 
lies is the finest in theological literature on revivals 
of religion in all periods. Edwards wrote a book on 
the revival in which he took part : Thoughts on the 
Revival of Religion in New England. It was the latter 
part of this work that suggested to Prince his now in- 
valuable Christian History. Tracy, The Great Awaken- 
ing, (Boston, 1842), gives a very full and impartial ac- 
count of the whole movement. The effect of this re- 
vival on the Presbyterian Church is given by many 
authors. Hodge, Constitutional History of the Pres- 
byterian Church, and Hall, History of the Presbyteri- 
an Church in Trenton, New Jersey, may be consulted 
to advantage. Marvin, Three Eras of Revival in the 
United States {Bibliotheca Sacra, vol. xvi., p. 279 ft*.) ia 
disappointing. 

1 Smith, Chronological Tables of Church History, 
p. 71. 

2 Contributions to the Ecclesiastical History of Con- 
necticut, p. 198, 199. 



488 



RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 



evangelists had not arrived. Even Nettle- 
ton had not as yet hegun his zealous and 
loving labors. But the sermons of such 
clear and honest preachers as Backus, Small- 
ey, Hooker, Griffin, Hallock, Mills, and Gil- 
lett produced a powerful effect, and many 
thousands were aroused from their spiritual 
lethargy. Subsequently to this revival there 
were seasons of unusual life in the church, 
and now and then great awakeuings in iso- 
lated sections. For example, in 1813, 1821, 
1826-27, and 1831, there were very many 
awakenings, but there was no general re- 
vival of religion in any of these years. 

In 1858, however, there occurred the third 
general revival in the history of the coun- 
try. This visitation was very different from 
the two which had preceded it. In the preach- 
ing there was no new stress on the lead- 
ing doctrines of revelation. There were no 
prominent evangelists who seemed to be the 
chief agents in bringing about the extraor- 
dinary displays of diviue power. But there 
was a singular union, never before approach- 
ed in the history of American Christianity, 
of the principal religious bodies iu prayer 
and conference. 

The daily prayer-meeting in Fulton Street, 
New York, was a new feature in the relig- 
ious life of the people; but such was the in- 
terest in it that it has not yet beeu aban- 
doned, and the anniversaries of its inaugu- 
ration are seasons of special religious exer- 
cises. Daily prayer -meetings were estab- 
lished in many cities and larger towns. 
Christian conversation, singing, and the dis- 
tribution of practical religious literature 
were powerful agencies in promoting the 
movement. The revival extended to Great 
Britain, and when it began to subside here 
it increased in interest throughout the Brit- 
ish Islands. 

The permanent effect of the revival of 
1858 has been chiefly in the increased fra- 
ternity of the great religious bodies. Cler- 
gymen and Christian laymen who had al- 
ways stood aloof were brought together, for 
the first time, as participants in a great work 
of common interest and enjoyment. These 
beautiful relations have never been inter- 
rupted, and the fraternity and cordiality of 
the evangelical churches of America during 
the last eighteen years have brought in a 
new era in modern ecclesiastical history. 



The fourth national revival began in the 
winter of 1875-76. There had been during 
the preceding year more than the ordina- 
ry evidences of popular religious interest. 
Messrs. Moody and Saukey went to England 
during 1873, and labored with remarkable 
success. Their success, in Scotland espe- 
cially, was such as to sileuce all objections. 
They continued their work southward, and 
in London were heard by people of every 
class. They returned to this country iu the 
summer of 1875, aud began their evangel- 
istic work in New England, but early trans- 
ferred the scene of their labors to Brooklyn, 
thence to Philadelphia, and then to New 
York. The directness, simplicity, aud strict- 
ly Biblical character of Mr. Moody's sermons, 
aud the manly pathos of Mr. Sankey's sing- 
ing, have reached every stratum of socie- 
ty, aud, besides leading thousands to the 
profession of faith, have quickened many 
churches in all the chief denominations. 

The fraternity, which assumed a positive 
and aggressive character for the first time, 
through the unifying power of the revival 
of 1858, has exhibited itself in various prac- 
tical and decisive forms even in the brief 
time which has since elapsed. When the 
civil war began, in 1861, there was suddenly 
thrown upon the religious life of the people 
a burden hardly less important than that 
which was placed upou the government. 
No American war has ever been without 
the great advantage which comes from an 
aroused religious sentiment ; and when the 
last strife came, the clergy and the laity 
united in special services, apart from tho 
days of thanksgiving, fasting, and prayer 
appointed by the civil authorities, for the 
divine blessing on the national arms. Cler- 
gymen of established position willingly gave 
up their parishes to become chaplains, and 
others to become officers in the army ; while 
those who remained at home united with 
the government in sustaining the popular 
enthusiasm. 

The Christian Commission was an organ- 
ization which arose directly from the relig- 
ious impulse of the people to provide spir- 
itual and temporal care for the soldiers in 
camp, on the march, and in hospital. It 
was an important arm of the government, 
and furnished such voluntary aud unpaid 
aid as would have been impossible for the 



PEACTICAL CHARACTER OF OUR RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 



489 



government to secure in any other way. 
The total receipts of the Christian Commis- 
sion, in money and other directions, were 
$6,264,607 ; its delegates numbered 4859 ; it 
distributed $3,700,000 in stores, and over 
one million of dollars' worth of Bibles, Tes- 
taments, books, religions journals, and other 
publications. 

The Sanitary Commission, which in no- 
wise dealt with the spiritual interests of the 
soldiers, had at its head a clergyman, the 
Rev. H. W. Bellows, D.D. 

Another evidence of the developing fra- 
ternal spirit of the Church may be seen in 
the session in New York, in the autumn of 
1873, of the Evangelical Alliance. The Alli- 
ance was organized in London in the year 
1846, and important sessions were held in 
London, Paris, Berlin, Geneva, and Amster- 
dam ; but the one held in New York far 
excelled in interest any previous session. 
Delegates from all parts of the Protestant 
field of Europe were in attendance, and, be- 
sides the important service which they ren- 
dered in furnishing reports of the condition 
of the countries which they represented, 
they enjoyed the experience of finding in 
this country what they never saw before — 
a church which had grown great through no 
nurture from the fatness of a civil support, 
but through the spontaneous aid of its own 
members. The scenes which they here be- 
held produced a lasting impression upon 
them, and books are still appearing from 
their hands, in the Continental languages, 
recounting the new experiences through 
which they here passed. Never has an ec- 
clesiastical body been so characterized by 
unity of feeling, scope of investigation, and 
universality of representation, and no sin- 
gle event in American ecclesiastical deliber- 
ation has, even in this brief interval, been 
followed by such salutary results. 

The theology of American Protestantism 
has grown out of the active religious life of 
the people. It is singularly devoid of the 
contemplative element. For the develop- 
ment of that, the day has not yet arrived. 
The great material problems to be solved by 
the people, aud the immediate spiritual ne- 
cessities of a new population and a vast un- 
occupied territory, have left no leisure for 
speculation. What to be Done was more a 
question than What to be Thought. The ro- 



bust theology of England at the time of the 
most rapid emigration gave tone to the en- 
tire religious life of the colonial time. The 
fundamentals of faith, such as they are con- 
strued and maintained by people with the 
gibbet and stake aud block in sight, were 
brought over to New England during the 
Stuart persecution, and became the control- 
ling theology of the colouies, aud even of 
the United States. The Cambridge Synod 
of 1648, the Boston Synod of 1680, and the 
Saybrook Platform of 1708, substantially 
moulded the religious thought of the New 
World. The preachers and house - fathers 
of the time drew their opinions from snch 
theology as was furnished by Ames's Medul- 
la, Wolleb's Compendium, and Willard's Body 
of Divinity. At the time of the great reviv- 
al under Edwards aud his coadjutors, there 
was a strong party iu the New England 
Church which opposed the special meas- 
ures, though more by reserve than by active 
antagonism : 

"Those gentle theolognes of calmer kind, 
Whose constitution dictates to their pens; 
Who, cold themselves, think ardor comes from hell." 

President Clap and Drs. Stiles and Chaun- 
cey did not sympathize with the earnest 
preaching and numerous awakenings. The 
great body of the Calvinistic clergy were 
divided into formal aud revival, or Old 
Lights and New Lights. Even the Con- 
necticut Legislature weut so far as, iu 1742, 
to iuflict penalties on enthusiasts. 1 Hop- 
kinsianism, which makes all virtue a disin- 
terested benevolence, and infers man's readi- 
ness to be damned for the glory of God, had 
gained such favor by the close of the eight- 
eenth century that in New England not less 
than one hundred preachers had accepted it. 
The protest against the prevalence of this 
bold type of Calvinistic theology had been 
for some time gathering strength before its 
culmination in 1805. Iu that year two 
events took place which, however small in 
themselves, had a profound influence upon 
the religious thought of New England, if 
not of the entire country. We refer to the 
election of the Unitarian, Dr. Ware, to the 
Hollis professorship in Harvard University, 
and to the publication of the essential infe- 
riority of Christ, by Hosea Ballou, in his work 

1 Smith, Chronological Tables of Church History, p. 
73. 



490 



KELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 



on Hie Atonement. The gauntlet was thus 
thrown down to the orthodox Church of 
New England, and a period of controversy 
began which, in spite of the occasionally ex- 
cessive ardor of the contestants, has been 
one of the most productive periods in mod- 
ern theological thought. Chanuing was 
leader of the protesting party, while Stuart 
and Woods took the most active part on the 
evangelical side. The contest was well sus- 
tained, and the literary fertility of the time 
was very great ; some works being publish- 
ed which have found a permauent place in 
the theology of the country. 

Among the names which appeared during 
the crisis for the first time, may be mention- 
ed Worcester, Sparks, Muler, Ripley, Norton, 
Dewey, Ellis, and Brownson. The chasm 
between the Unitarians and the Evangel- 
ical Church constantly widened. Unitarian 
churches increased with great rapidity, and 
the defection from the old standards threat- 
ened to be very serious. By the year 1843 
there existed no less than one hundred and 
thirty Unitarian congregations in Massa- 
chusetts alone — " hardly twenty of which," 
says the late Bishop Burgess, " were Unita- 
rian in their origin." 1 The extreme of the 
protest may be seen in Ralph Waldo Emer- 
son and Theodore Parker. For a time Em- 
erson was connected with the Unitarians, 
and in 1826 was "approbated to preach." 
In 1829 he became colleague of Henry Ware, 
pastor of the Second Unitarian Church of 
Boston. He preached but three years, hav- 
ing asked for his dismission on account of 
differences with the members on the Lord's- 
supper. His entire subsequent life has been 
occupied in arduous literary labors. There 
is no department of our higher general lit- 
erature which has not been enriched by his 
careful and chaste pen ; but his poetry and 
essays every where give abundant evidence 
of his early theological tastes, and, after a 
careful reading of him, it occasions no sur- 
prise when informed that for six successive 
generations his family had not been without 
a preacher, on the paternal or maternal side. 
He has never constructed a system. Per- 
haps Professor H. B. Smith's definition of 
his views is as near an approach as cau be 



1 Pages from the Ecclesiastical History of New En- 
gland, p. 121, 122. 



expected : " He apparently adopts a panthe- 
istic idealism." 

Parker never forsook the ministry, but, 
having left the Unitarians, he became pas- 
tor of the Twenty-eighth Congregational So- 
ciety in Boston. He denied miracle and the 
supernatural, and preached with great elo- 
quence the gospel of humanity and nature. 
Parker espoused the cause of the slave when 
slavery was popular, and had its apologists 
iu every part of the country. His great sym- 
pathies were so aroused that the wrongs of 
the negro occupied an important place iu his 
sermons, lectures, and writings. He strug- 
gled heroically against disease, and finally 
died in Florence, Italy, while on a tour for 
the restoration of his health. He left no 
school. His humaue spirit, however, which 
possessed the courage of the real reformer, 
served immensely to mature the sentiment 
which culminated in the downfall of slav- 
ery and the assertion of equal rights for all 
inhabitants of the land. His glowing style 
was a distinguishing feature of his author- 
ship, and his warmth of diction never left 
him. Such periods as the following, from 
his last monograph, distinguish all stages 
of his career : " History shows that the Her- 
cules' Pillars of one age are sailed through 
in the next, and a wide ocean entered on, 
which in due time is found rich with islands 
of its own, and washing a vast continent 
not dreamed of by such as slept within 
their temples old, while it sent to their 
very coasts its curious joints of unwonted 
cane, its seeds of many an unknown tree, 
and even elaborate boats, wherein lay the 
starved bodies of strange - featured men, 
with golden jewels in their ears." 1 It is 
but just to say that he never lost his dis- 
taste for the evangelical doctrines. We 
have Miss Cobbe's authority for saying that 
when, on his last Sunday morning iu Flor- 
ence, and on earth, he was told, " It is Sun- 
day; a blessed day, is it not, dear friend ?" 
the dying consumptive replied, " Yes, when 
one has got over the superstition of it, a 
most blessed day." 3 

Another form of conflict in l'eligious ideas, 
though in a very different department, is to 

1 Experience as a Minister, p. 89. 

2 Religious Demands of the Age, p. 60. This little 
volume (American edition) is a reprint of the Preface 
to the London edition of Parker's Collected Works. 



FRACTIONARY ELEMENTS. 



491 



be found in the relation of Roman Catholi- 
cism to Protestantism on the subject of the 
use of the Bible in the public schools. In 
1840 the Roman Catholics of New York 
made their first attempt in this country to 
prevent the use of the Bible in the common 
schools. From that time to the present, the 
controversy has been uninterrupted, though 
changing form with the revolutions and re- 
lations of the political parties. The policy 
of the Roman Catholic Church has been to 
control alike the parties and the education 
of the entire land. With what interest it 
watches the training of the young, and how 
desirous it is of taking the rudimentary in- 
struction in its own hand, may be seen in 
the following bold language of The Catho- 
lic World of September last : " The superin- 
tendence and direction of the public schools, 
as well as those wherein the mass of the 
people are instructed in the rudiments of 
human kuowledge, as of those where sec- 
ondary and higher instruction are given, 
belong of right to the Catholic Church. 
She alone has the right of watching over 
the moral character of those schools ; of ap- 
pointing the masters who instruct the youth 
therein; of controlling their teaching; and 
dismissing, without appeal to any other au- 
thority, those whose doctrines or manners 
should be contrary to the purity of Chris- 
tian doctrine." 

Where this Church can not prevent the 
use of the Bible in the public schools, it 
withdraws the children of its fold, and then 
demands special appropriations from the 
public treasury for the support of its insti- 
tutions. From the city treasury of New 
York alone, in the year 1869, the Roman 
Catholics obtained the sum of $651,191; in 
1870, $711,436 ; in 1871, $552,818— an aggre- 
gate, in three years, of $1,915,445. There 
was a just interruption, after 1872, to these 
receipts, owing to the loss of sympathy in 
consequence of the overthrow of Tweed and 
the other thieves who had fattened on the 
public treasure. But two institutions alone 
(the Roman Catholic Protectory and the 
Foundling Asylum of the Sisters of Char- 
ity) received from the treasury of the city, 
in 1872, the sum of $276,836 ; in 1873, $290,- 
000; in 1874, $370,410; in 1875, $398,355, 
with $47,000 yet to be paid — making in all, 
for 1875, $445,355. The amount proposed in 



the tax levy of 1876 for these two Romanist 
institutions is $428,050. 

The Roman Catholics do not care so 
much that religion is taught in the common 
schools. But it is not their religion which 
they can hope to see taught in them. " Had 
this controversy," says Diman, " turned sim- 
ply on the reading of a few verses of King 
James's version at the opening of the daily 
exercises, it need have caused no intelligent 
Protestant embarrassment. Simple justice 
would have dictated a concession involving 
neither disrespect to the Almighty nor peril 
to the spiritual welfare of the child. But 
the difficulty lay deeper; the real grievance 
of the Catholic was, not that too much, but 
that too little, religious instruction was giv- 
en in the schools ; he dreaded an education 
from which all positive religious inllueuce 
had been eliminated ; he rejected, in other 
words, the whole theory on which the pub- 
lic-school system had been based." 1 

In looking at the aggregate of the relig- 
ious life and opinions of the American peo- 
ple during the first century, we find a prog- 
ress fully equal to the expectation of those 
seers who stood at the threshold of our na- 
tional history aud looked into the future 
with hopeful anticipations. With obstacles 
such as no modern nation has had to contend 
with, the people have been supplied with a 
religious literature that has been at once 
quickening and elevating. Tlie religious 
journals, theological quarterlies, popular re- 
ligious works, and theological treatises de- 
serve to stand beside those of the British 
and Prussian natious. The schools for the 
education of the clergy have grown with the 
religious wants of the people. The religious 
life has been earnest aud evangelistic, aud 
yet not without aspirations and efforts for 
the highest culture. The churches have 
come out of the dim twilight of mutual mis- 
apprehension, and have seen the great Amer- 
ican fulfillment of the diversity of gifts and 
the sameness of the Spirit. The great bod- 
ies have developed from feeble beginnings 
to vast organizations, whose operations are 
felt from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and in 
many heathen countries. The American 
churches are now making gigantic attempts, 
not merely to preach the Gospel in pagan 

i Religion in America, 1776-1S76, North American Re- 
view, January, 1S76, p. 39. 



492 



RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 



lands, but in those European nations where 
Romanism and skepticism have long held 
sway. 

It is one of the ironies of history that 
American missionaries are to-day preaching 
in Berlin, old Upsala, Frankfort, and Rome, 
while the capital of Constantine, and Beirut, 
the seat of the celehrated school of Roman 
law, are powerful centres for the distribu- 
tion of religious knowledge to the people 
of many languages. The religious care of 
childhood has grown in this country to such 
proportions as have led the leading denomi- 
nations to adopt uniform subjects of study 
in Sunday - schools, and some of the best 
minds of the country have made it a chosen 
task to provide an elevated juvenile litera- 
ture for the country. The Sabbath, not- 
withstanding the strong Continental preju- 
dices of some of the people, has had among 
its warm defenders even organized associa- 
tions. 1 

The great temperance reform, which has 
frequently leaned for support on the politic- 
al arm, has learned at last to take high mor- 
al grounds, and look to the conscience as its 
strongest stay. The American pulpit has 
been, and will still be, one of the most pow- 
erful agencies for the promotion of the great 
vital interests of American civilization. 
Thompson's words are amply justified by the 
facts of the century, "The pulpit in the 
United States," says he, "has ever been 
among the foremost of social forces, stimu- 
lating the people to intellectual life, en- 
couraging culture and science, and creating 
a public sentiment ovitside of the church 
itself for all that is true and noble and 
good." 2 

While our theology has been largely de- 
rived from Continental and British sources, 
there has grown up of late a disposition for 
original theological investigation which 
could not have appeared at an earlier peri- 
od in our history. The absence of great li- 
braries has been severely felt, but this in- 



1 Probably the first attempt made to protect the 
sanctity of the Sabbath was in the forms of popular 
protests against the Congressional act of 1S10, which 
required the carrying of mails on that day.— Davis, 
Half-century, p. 1S4, 186. 

2 Church and State in the United States, p. 123, 124. 



convenience is now in process of removal — 
first, by the judicious purchase of libraries 
in Europe ; and, second, by the now fre- 
quent completion of professional studies in 
the German universities, and in contact 
with foreign masters in every science. 
There is less dependence now than ever be- 
fore on foreign sources, and yet a more 
healthful and appreciative utilization of ev- 
ery aid that can come from any quarter. 

The discriminating spirit with which the 
American mind and conscience have select- 
ed the better fruits of European culture and 
religion, and rejected the unworthy and ill- 
grown, has been too great to be appreci- 
ated at this early date. But this virtue 
will still be exercised, and the future Amer- 
ican Christian will accept aud discard as 
right requires, aud will say : 

" The leaves, wherewith embowered is all the garden 
Of the Eternal Gardener, do I love 
As much as lie has granted them of good." 

The interchange of evangelistic efforts is 
constantly increasing. Pearsall Smith went 
from Philadelphia, and made the tour of 
France and Germany ; Varley came from 
London, and made the tour of the United 
States and Canadas ; and Moody and San- 
key, Americans, were not familiar to Ameri- 
can ears until they achieved their wonder- 
ful success in Great Britain. To the relig- 
ious bond between America and England 
we must look as an important agent for the 
preservation of fraternal relations. Alston's 
glowing tribute to Anglo-Saxon unity is 
more a fact in religious than political life : 

" While the manners, while the arts, 
That mould a nation's soul 
Still cling around our hearts, 

Between let ocean roll, 
One joint communion breaking with the sun : 
Yet still from either beach 
The voice of blood shall reach, 
More audible than speech, 
'We are one !' " 

Good Bishop Howley said, many years 
ago, in plain prose : " The surest pledge of 
perpetual peace between the two countries 
is to be found in their community of faith, 
and in the closeness of their ecclesiastical 
intercourse." Have not all the events of 
the first American national century proved 
the truth of these wise words? 



INDEX. 



The subjects in this Index indicated by an asterisk (*) are illustrated. 



Abbe, C, 314-316. 

Acoustics, 316-318. 

Adams, Charles P., 381. 

Adams, John, 32, 35. 

"Adams" Press, *131. 

Adams, Samuel, 35, 3T. 

Addressing-machines, *135, 136. 

Admiralty Jurisdiction, 441-443. 

Agricultural Implements :— Hoe and Plow, *43; vari- 
ous kinds of Plows, *44-46 ; Reaping-machines, *46- 
49 ; Threshing-machines, *49, 50. 

Agricultural Progress, 23, 174-184 :— The Climate, Em- 
igration, Agricultural Chemistry and Implements, 
175 ; Drilling-machines, Grain, and Labor, 176, 177 ; 
California Farms and the Condition of the Soils, 
17S ; Manuring, 179, ISO ; Tobacco and Cotton Culti- 
vation, Drainage and Irrigation, 180; Importation 
of Live Stock, 181-183; Horses, 1S3; The Cheese-fac- 
tory System, 1S3,184 ; Journalism, Schools, and Col- 
leges, 184. 

Albany, Dutch at, 20. 

Alcott, A. Bronson, 389. 

Alcott, Louisa M., 394. 

Aldine Classics, The, 120. 

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 391. 

Alexander, Cosmo, 407, 40S. 

Alexander, S., 307, 308. 

Alexandria, Pharos of, 80. 

Alger, William R., 3S6. 

Allen, Ethan, 35S, 359. 

Allen, Horatio, 40. 

Allibone, S. A., 396. 

Allston, Washington, Portrait of, 405 ; Biography of, 
362,411. 

America, Adam Smith's Opinion of, 156. 

American Plows of 1776, "44 ; of 1785-1874, *46. 

Ames, Fisher, 355, 357. 

Amherst, General, 265. 

Anaesthesia, 425, 426. 

Anaesthetics, 115. 

Anderson, Alexander, Portrait of, 404 ; Sketch of, 414. 

Aneurism, Popliteal, 423. 

Animal Painting, 413. 

Animals, Protection of, 450. 

Apple-paring Machines, 96. 

Arkwright, Richard, and Cotton Machinery, 40-42. 

Arkwright's Spinning-machine, *64. 

Arnold, Benedict, 35. 

Arnold, Matthew, 291. 

Art Culture, Growth of, 415; Public Galleries, 401; 
Union, National, 402. 



Artificial Limbs. *115. 

Arts, Fine, Progress of the, 399-415: — John Watson, 
Portrait-painter at Perth Amboy, 399; John Smy- 
bert, Bishop Berkeley, and Benjamin Franklin's 
Prophesy of a successful Future to Art among 
his own Countrymen, 400 ; Public Art Galleries, 
401 ; Commotion caused by the Appearance of 
Power's "Greek Slave" in this Country, Founding 
of the American Art Union and its Influence on 
Art Culture, Worthless Copies of the Old Masters 
palmed on the Country, and Organization of the 
New York Academy of Fine Arts, 402 ; National 
Academy of Design, with Professor Morse as Presi- 
dent, Established in New York, 403; An Academy 
of Art formed in Philadelphia, under the Presiden- 
cy of George Clymer, 403, 404 ; Water-color Paint- 
ing, and the Formation of the "American Socie- 
ty of Painters in Water-colors," 405, 406; Portrait 
Painting— Benjamin West, 401, 406, 407; John Sin- 
gleton Copley and Wollaston, 407 ; Cosmo Alex- 
ander, Robert E. Pine, and Charles Wilson Peale, 
40S; Rembrandt Peale, 405, 409; William Duulap, 
Robert Fulton, John Wesley Jarvis, Chester Har- 
ding, Gilbert Stuart Newton, and C. C. Ingham, 
409; Gilbert Charles Stuart, 401, 409; Professor 
Morse, 408, 409 ; Johu Vanderlyn, 410 ; Thomas Sul- 
ly, 407, 410; Henry Iuman, 409, 410; William Page, 
Charles Loring Elliot, Daniel Huntington, Oliver 
Stone, Thomas Le Clear, Richard M. Staigg, and 
George A. Baker, 410 ; Historical Painting— Col. Jno. 
Trumbull, 403, 410; Washington Allston, 405, 411; 
Emanuel Leutze, 411 ; Landscape Painting — Daniel 
Huntingdon, Asher Brown Durand, and Robert Gif- 
ford, 412; Thomas Cole, 409, 412; George Inuess, 
Frederick Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, 412; 
John Frederick Kensett, 412-414 ; Jervis M'Entee, 
Washington Whittredge, Samuel Colman, Richard 
W. Hubbard, 412, 413 ; F. H. De Haas, Charles Tem- 
ple Dix, 413; Figure and Genre Painting — Eastman 
Johnson, Edwin White, E. W. Perry, J. Matteson, S. 
Mount, J. Wood, J. G. Brown, John W. Ehninger, 
Elihn Vedder, George H. Boughton, W. J. Heunessy, 
and R. C. Woodville, 413; Animal Painting— W. H. 
Beard, James Beard, and William Hays, 413 ; Sculpt- 
ure — Horatio Greenough, Thomas Crawford, Hi- 
ram Powers, J. Q. A. Ward, W. W. Story, E. D. Palm- 
er, Thomas Ball, Henry Kirke Brown, Randolph 
Rogers, Joel T. Hart, Launt Thompson, Johu Rog- 
ers, Harriet Hosmer, Margaret Foley, and Emma 
Stebbins, 413. 414; Engraving — Paul Revere, 399, 
414; Alexander Anderson, 404, 414; Drawing on 
Wood— F. O. C. Darley, Augustus Hoppiu, A. L. Fred- 



494 



INDEX. 



ericks, Thomas Nast, Thomas Moran, Peter Moran, 
and Sol Eytinge, 414; Caricature — Thomas Nast 
and Sol Eytinge, 414; Frank Bellew, Michael 
Woolf, Charles S. Reinhart, A. B. Frost, T. Wust, 
Thomas Worth, and L. Hopkins, 415 ; Growth of Art 
Culture, 415 ; Portrait of Hiram Powers, 411. 

Asbury, Bishop, 47T, 4S2. 

Asteroids, Discovery of, 300. 

Astronomy, 297-314. 

Asylum, Willard, The, 470. 

Atlantic Hurricanes, 315; Telegraph, 326. 

Atmospheric Railways, 105, 106. 

Auroras, 310, 311. 

Auscultation, Discovery of, 421. 

B. 

Bacon, Leonard, 397. 

Baker, George A., 410. 

Bakewell, Robert, 1S2. 

Ball, Thomas, 414. 

Bullhorn's Graimnatography, statistics from, 122. 

Balloons, 106. 107. 

Baltimore, Lord (Cheilitis Calvert), 4S3. 

Bancroft, George, 3S1, 382. 

Bank, National, Established, 241 ; Statements, Com- 
parative, 1S20-1S48, 252. 

Bank-note Engraving, 77. 

Bankruptcy Law, 1S00. 242. 

Bankruptcy, 445^447. 

Banks, Suspension of, in 1839, 251 ; Suspension of Pa- 
per Payments by the, 259. 

Baptists, The, 481, 482. 

Barlow, Joel, 356, 357. 

Barnard, Henry, 285. 

Barograph, The, *114. 

Barter Currency, 23S. 

Bartlett, Elisha, 428. 

Bartol, Cyrus A., 397. 

Beard, James II., 413. 

Beard, W. II., 413. 

Beaumont, William, 424. 

Beecher, Henry Ward, 397. 

Bellew, Frank, 415. 

Bellows Camera, The, *141. 

Bellows, Rev. H. W., 4S9. 

Bell's Reaping-machine, *47, 4S ; Steamboat Comet, *54. 

Belvoir, the Mansion of Lord Fairfax, 21. 

Berkeley, Bishop, 400. 

Berkeley, Governor, apostrophizes ignorance, 20. 

Bermuda Floating Dock, *82, 83. 

Bessemer Casting Process, *72-74. 

Beverly, Massachusetts, first Cotton Mill at, 40. 

Biddle, C. C, 246, 250. 

Bigelow, Henry I., 427. 

Bigelow, Jacob, 428. 

Bierstadt, Albert, 412. 

Billings, Josh (H. W. Shaw), 390. 

Bills of Exchange, 240 ; " Receivable," 250. 

" Black Friday," 258. 

Black-leading Machine, 27. 

Blanchard's Spoke-lathe, *92. 

Blenkinsop's Locomotive, *56. 

Blind, Treatment of the, 472. 

Blowers and Blowing-engines, 106. 

Blow-pipe, Compound, 332. 

Boker, George H.,395. 

Bond, W. C, 298-300. 

Boone, Daniel, 30, 219. 

Boring and Drilling, 85. 

BostOD in 1774,33. 

Botany, 342, 343. 



Bonghton, George II., 413. 

Boutwell,Mr.,257. 

Bowditch, H. I., 427. 

Bowditch, Nathaniel, 297. 

Brackeuridge, Hugh Heury, 357. 

Bradford, William, 36. 

Brainard, Daniel, 427. 

Brandt, Joseph, 31. 

Bridges, Iron, *S6-SS. 

British Immigrants, 233. 

Brooks, Charles T., 397. 

Brooks, Maria, 395. 

Brown, C. B., 357, 358. 

Brown, Henry Kirke, 414. 

Brown, J. G., 413. 

Browne, Charles F. (Artemus Ward), 390. 

Brownson, Dr., 4S3. 

Brace's Type-casting Machine, *123. 

Bryant, William Culleu, 359-361. 

Buck, Guidon, 427. 

Bullock, William, 133. 

Bnrgoyne, John, 31-35. 

Burr, A., Rev., 31. 

Burr, Aaron, 354. 

Bushnell, Horace, 397. 



Caissons, 80-S2; at Copenhagen, *S1 ; at East River 

Bridge, New York, *81. 
Calhoun, J. C, 244, 386. 
California Land Claims, 447, 44S. 
Calvert, Cheilitis (Lord Baltimore), 483. 
Calvert, Leonard, 214. 
Calvinistic Doctrine, 35S, 359. 
Camera, The Bellows, *141. 
Campbell's Cylinder Press, *131. 
Canals, Sesostris, SO ; Suez, 80. 
Carbon in Graphite, Method of determining, 333. 
Carey, Mathew, 483. 
Carmichael, William, 221. 
Carolina, Formation of the Colony of, 216; Exemption 

from Caste in North, 22 ; Aversion to Slavery in 

South, 22. 
Cary, Alice, 396. 
Cary, Phosbe, 396. 
Cassini, J., 299. 

Catholics, Danger from the growing Influence of, 275. 
Census in the United States ordered, 147-150; The 

First, 221. 
Chain Pumps, Perronet's Chapelets, *84. 
Chambers's Folding-machines, *135. 
"Champion " Reaping-machine, *49. 
Channing, William Ellery, 367, 3S9. 
Cheese Factories, 183, 184. 
Cheever, Ezekiel, the Founder of Schools, 280. 
Cheves, Langdon, 246. 
Chemistry, 331-336 ; Agricultural, 175. 
Child's, Sir Josiah, Reasons why the Dutch were more 

prosperous than the English, 201, 202. 
Childhood, Early, Ode on, 361. 
Children, Criminal Treatment of Unfortunate, 464, 

405; Prevention of Children's Crimes, 465, 466; 

Children's Aid Society, 466-168. 
Chloroform and its Uses, 115, 333, 428. 
Chromosphere, The, 309. 
Chronograph, Printing, 300, 301. 
Chronometers, Nautical, Transportation of, 301. 
Church, Frederick Edwin, 412, 413. 
Cities, American, in 1775, 34. 
Cities, Population and Growth of, 224,225. 
City of Peking, Steamship, *54. 



INDEX. 



495 



Clark, Alonzo, 428. 

Clark, Alvan, 299. 

Clayborne, Captain William, 214. 

Clemens, S. L. (Mark Twain), 390. 

Clergy, Characteristics of the, in the Colonies, 31. 

Clinch, Joseph II., 395. 

Clinton, De Witt, 2S2, 283. 

Clinton, George, and the Common Schools, 282. 

Cloth, Manufacture of, 154. 

Coal, Discovery of, 28 ; Utilization of, in Industry, 41 ; 
Deposits of, 1S5-189. 

Coddington, William, 215. 

Codes and Revised Statutes, 451. 

Coffee and Tea Duties repealed, 257. 

Coinage, 23S, 241, 24S ; " Pine-tree," 70. 

Cole, Thomas, Portrait of, 409 ; Sketch of, 412. 

Colleges, 36, 37 ; Princeton, 23, 37; Harvard, 36; Dart- 
mouth, 37; Yale, 37 ; Columbia, 37; William and 
Mary's, 37; Agricultural, 1S4; Medical, 416. 

Colman, Samuel, 412, 413. 

Colonial Preparations for the Union, 264-207; Juris- 
prudence, 436, 437. 

Colonial Progress, 16-38 :— Congress of 1776, 17; Ex- 
tent of Territory at the Formation of the Republic, 
18; Growth of the Southern Colonies, and Igno- 
rance of the Country beyond the Mississippi, 19; 
Religious Creeds in the North and South, and Ig- 
norance of Virginia, in 1671,20; Slavery first institu- 
ted in Virginia, 21 ; Feeling in the Colonies toward 
England in 1775, 22, 23; Agriculture, 23; Cotton, 
24; Ship-building, 25 ; Manufactures, 26; Iron and 
Coal, 27; Indians, 29; Pioneers, 30; the Clergy, 31, 
32 ; Religion and Politics in the Revolution, 32 ; Cit- 
ies, 34 ; The Press and Education, 36 ; Literature, 37. 

Colonies, Religious Sentiment in the, 474,475; Segre- 
gation of the, 222, 223. 

Colonists, General Character of the, in 1775, 35 ; their 
fortunate Condition, 262, 263. 

Columbia College, 37. 

"Columbian" Printing-press, "128. 

Commerce, Interstate, 203. 

Commercial Development, 200-210: — Adam Smith's 
Treatise on the "Wealth of Nations," 200; Sir Jo- 
6iah Child's Reasons why the Dutch were more 
prosperous than the English, 201, 202; Exchanges 
of Products, 205; Prairie Produce, 206; General 
Consumption the Cause of the Country's Prosperi- 
ty, 206, 207; Machinery a Saving of Labor to the 
Artisan, 208; Restrictions upon Exchange, 209, 210. 

Comets, 299, 300, 309-314. 

Common-school System, Success of the, 285. 

Comstock, Adam, 282, 283. 

Condell's Artificial Arm, *115. 

Congregationalism, 4S1. 

Congress, July, 1776, 17; Washington's First Mestige 
and Hamilton's Famous Report, to, 161 ; First Con- 
tinental, 1774, 239 ; Greater Personal Integrity need- 
ed in, 276. 

Connecticut in 1775, 22; First Settlements in, 215. 

Consolidation, Danger of, 273. 

Constitutions, Written, 437, 43S. 

Consumption, General, Essential to Material Prosper- 
ity of the Country, 207. 

Contact Level, The, 73. 

Contraband Traders, 158. 

Cooke, Jay, and Co., Suspension of, 258. 

Cooper, J. F., 37, 364, 365. 

Cooper, Sir Astley, 423. 

Copenhagen, Caisson at, *S1. 

Copley, John Singleton, Portrait of, 400 ; Biography 
of, 407. 



Copper and Copper Mines, 195-197. 

Copyrights, 443, 444. 

Cornish Pumping-engine, *51. 

Cotton, Production of, 24 ; The First Mill in America, 
40 ; Spinning, Weaving, and Dyeing, 61-68 ; Cultiva- 
tion of, 180. 

Courts, Twofold System of, 438-441. 

Cranch, C. P., 395. 

Crawford, Thomas, Portrait and Sketch of, 413, 414. 

Creeds. See Denominations. 

Crime and Education, 289. 

Criminals, Extradition of, 444, 445 ; Management of, 
454, 455. 

Crompton's Fancy Loom, *66. 

Cummins, Maria S., 394. 

Currency, Fractional, 256; Congressional Restrictions 
on the, 257. 

Curtis, George William, 220, 3S0, 3S1. 

Cutter, Rev. Dr., 42S. 

D. 

Daguerre's Scientific Researches, 321-323. 

Dallas, A. J., 244. 

Dalton, John C, 428, 429. 

Dana, Richard Henry, and his Works, 362, 

Dana, Richard Henry, Jim., 397. 

Danks's Mechanical Furnace, *71. 

Darley, Felix O.C.,414. 

Dartmouth College, 37. 

Davy, Sir Humphry, 17S. 

Dawes's Scientific Discoveries, 299. 

Deaf and Dumb, Treatment of the, 472. 

Debtors, Imprisonment of, 45S-460. 

Declaration of Independence, Signers of the, 17. 

De Forest, J. W., 394. 

De Haas, F. H., 413. 

Delaware, Settlement formed in, 216. 

De La Rue, T., 308, 309. 

Denominations, Religions: — Methodism, 477, 4S2 ; 
Episcopal, 480, 481; Cougregatioualist, 481; Dutch 
Reformed, 481 ; Baptists, 4S1, 482; Lutherans, 482 ; 
Presbyterians, 4S2 ; German Reformed, 4S2; Roman 
Catholics, 483, 484 ; Statistics of, 4S4, 4S5; Unitari- 
ans, 489, 490, 491. 

Dentistry, 426. 

Derby, George H. (or John Phoenix), 390. 

Derrick, Floating, *S2. 

Design, National Academy of, 403. 

Dewey, Orville, 36S. 

Dickerson, Mr., New Jersey, 228. 

Disease, Prevention of, 432, 433. 

Dix, Charles Temple, 413. 

Dock, Floating, *S3. 

Dodge, Mary A., 397. 

Dodd's and Stephenson's Locomotive, *57. 

Dover, New England, 215. 

Drainage, Improvement in, 84, 180. 

Drake, Daniel, 42S. 

Drake, J. R., 37, 305. 

Draper, Dr. Henry, 303, 304. 

Draper, John W., 384. 

Drilling and Boring, S5. 

Drinker, Mrs. (Edith May), 395. 

Duaue, W.,247. 

Duel between A. Hamilton and Aaron Burr, 354. 

Dunlap, William, 409. 

Dunstan Pillar, 179. 

Dnrand, Asher Brown, 412. 

Dutch, Sir Josiah Child's Reasons why they were 
more prosperous than the English, 201, 202; Re- 
formed Church, 4S1. 



496 



INDEX. 



Duyckinck, E. A., 396. 
Duyckinck, G. L., 396. 
Dwight, Timothy, 356. 
Dyeiug-niacniuery, 07, 68. 

E. 

Early Childhood, Ode on, 361. 

Ecclesiastical Independence in the Colonies, 478, 479. 
Eddystone Light-house, 80. 

Education and Free Schools, 36 ; Introduction of, 279 j 
in the South and Northwest, 287, 28S; and Crime, 
289; Industrial, 291 ; Our Prospects in, 292, 293. 
Educational Progress, 279-293:— Introduction of Edu- 
cation, 279; Arrangement of Schools, and Ezekiel 
Cheever, the Pounder of Scholastic Establishments, 
2S0 ; The Schools of New England and New York, 
2S1 ; George Clinton and the Common Schools of 
New York, Jede Peck, Adam Comstock, De Witt 
Clinton, and Gideon Hawley, 2S2-284; Sectarian 
Contest in Public Education, 284 ; Establishment of 
Normal Schools, and Success of the Common-school 
System, 2S5, 286 ; Education in the Southern and 
Northwestern States, 2S7, 2SS ; Education and Crime, 
289; Physical Progress of the Country produced 
by the Schools and the Press, 290; Industrial Edu- 
cation and the Schools of Germany, 291 ; Our Ed- 
ucational Prospects, 292, 293. 
Edwards, Jonathan, 31, 349-351, 486. 

Egypt, Glass-making in, •111. 

Egyptian and Cuneiform, Ideographic and Syllabic 
Writing, *11S, 119. 

Ehninger, John W., 413. 

Electric Light, *103, 104. 

Electricity, 324-328; Voltaic Induction and Magneto- 
electricity, 328, 329 ; Induction Coils, 329, 330 ; Static 
Electricity, 330 ; Thermo-electricity, 331. 

Electro-magnetism, 300, 301. 

Electroplating, 102, *103 ; Dome of a Cathedial at St. 
Petersburg gilded, *103. 

Electrotyping, 126-128 ; Black-leading Machine, Press, 
Bath, and Battery, *127. 

Elevators, 92, 93. , 

Elliot, Charles Loring, 410. 

Emerson, G. B., 285. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 36S-371. 

Emigration, Westward, 219, 220. 

Emmons, Nathaniel, 358, 359. 

English Machinery, Exportation of, prohibited, 40; 
Reaping-machines, *50; Locomotives, *58. 

Engraving, 136,137. 

Episcopal Tyranny, Opposition to, 31 ; Church, 480, 
4S1. 

Episcopacy, established in the South, 20, 21. 

Equatorial, The Great, *78. 

Ericsson's Screw-propeller, 54. 

Espy, J. P., 314-316. 

Ether brought into notice by Drs. Morton and Jack- 
son, 115. 

Evans, Oliver, 40. 

Evans's Locomotive, *56. 

Everett, Edward, 3S8, 389. 

Excavations at Halletfs Point Reef, *85. 

Exchange, Restrictions upon, 209, 210. 

Executive, Strength of the, 270-272. 

Exemption Laws, 449. 

Explorations, Government, Wilkes's Expedition, The 
Lynch Dead Sea Exploration, Gillis's Solar Parallax 
Expedition, The Polaris Expedition, and the Tran- 
sit of Venus, 295. 

Extradition of Criminals, 444,445. 

Eytiuge, Sol., 414,415. 



Fabricius, Rev. Jacob, 4S2. 

Factory System, Origin and Growth of, 42. 

Fairfax, Lord, Patron of Washington, 21. 

Faneuil, Peter, 474, 475. 

Faraday, Michael, 324-331. 

Faye's Scientific Researches, 30S, 309. 

Federal Governments, E. A. Freeman on, 266. 

" Federalist," The, the Political Classic of the United 

States, 353. 
Ferdinand's Ice-making Machine, *109. 
Ferguson, James, 300. 
Fiction, Early Writers of, 357, 358. 
Field, Cyrus W., 320. 
Fields, James T., 39S. 
Figure and Genre Printing, 413. 
Filter, Centrifugal, "110. 

Financial Crisis in 1836, 249; 1861,255; Perils, 275, 276. 
Fiuley, Samuel, 4S7. 
Fire-arms, 76, 97-100. 
Fire-engines and Fire-alarms, "103,104. 
Fisher, A. M., 297. 
Fiske, John, 398. 
Flint, Austin, 429. 
Folding-machines, "135. 
Foley, Margaret, 414. 

Foreign Elements in our Population, 231-236. 
Forster, W. E., 203. 
Franklin, B., 35, 36, 349-351. 
Franklin, Dr., Postmaster-general, 229. 
Franklin, James, 36. 
"Franklin " Press, The, "128. 
Frediicks, Alfred L., 414. 
Free Schools, 285. 
Freedmen's Bureau, The, 486. 
Freeman, E. A., on Federal Governments, 266. 
Freneau, Philip, 356. 
Frost, A. B., 415. 

Fulton, Robert, 53, 409 ; Steamboat built by, "53. 
Fulton Street Prayer-meeting, New York, 4S8. 
Furnaces, Blasting, 69-72; Stetefeldt's Roasting, "108. 

G. 

Gadsden, Christopber, 35. 

Galle's Scientific Discoveries, 299. 

Gas, Works of, Diagram of, *107 ; Inventions in, 109. 

Gates, Horatio, 35. 

Gauge, Whit worth's Millionth Measuring, *79. 

Gaul, Reaping in, *47. 

Genre Painting, 413. 

Geographical Extensions, 226, 227. 

Geoiogy, 347, 348. 

Georgia, Settlement in, 217. 

German Reformed Church, The, 482. 

Germany, Industrial Education in, 291. 

Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln's Oration at, 3SS, 389. 

Gibbs, Dr., 319-321. 

Gibbs's Plow, *45. 

Gifford, Robert, 412, 413. 

Giles, Henry, 396. 

Gladstone's Reaping-machine, *47, 48. 

Glass, 111, 112 ; Making in Egypt, "111. 

Goddard, William, 230. 

Godwin, Parke, 384. 

Gold, 197-199 ; Discovery of, in California, 253. 

Golden, C. D., 33. 

" Gordon " Press, The, "132. 

Government, Financial Situation of, under Andrew 
Jackson, 246; Federal, 206; Republican and Dem- 
ocratic form of, 266. 



INDEX. 



497 



Graphite, Method of determining Carbon in, 333. 
Gravitation, Application of the Principle of, in As- 
tronomy, with reference to Inequalities, 306, 307. 
"Greek Slave," Power's, 402. 
Greene, A. G., 395. 
Greene, George W., 384. 
Greene, Nathaniel, 3S4. 
Gieenough, Horatio, 413, 414. 
Greenwood, Grace (Mrs. Lippincott), 396. 
Griffin, Dr., 4ST. 
Griswold, R. W., 396. 
Guauo, 179, 180. 
Guns and Artillery, 97-100 ; Taylor's Machine Gun, 

*99. 

H. 

Haine's Reaping-machine, 47, 48. 

Hale, Edward Everett, 394. 

Halleck, Pitz-Greene, 37, 365, 366. 

Hallett's Point Reef, Excavations at, *85. 

Halley's Discoveries, '299. 

Hamilton, Alexander, 37, 161, 353; killed in a Duel wuh 

Aaron Burr, 354. 
Hamilton's Famous Report to Congress, 161. 
Hamilton, Gail (Mary A. Dodge), 398. 
Hargreaves's Spinning-jenny, *63. 
Harland, Marian (Mrs. Terhuue), 394. 
Hart, Joel T., 414. 
Hart, JohnS., 396. 
Harte, P. Bret, 390. 
Harvard College, 36. 
Hawley, Gideon, 283. 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 391-393. 
Hay, John, 391. 
Hayne, Paul H., 396. 
Hays, William, 413. 
Hayward, George, 427. 

Heat, Study of the Laws of the Distribution of, 309. 
Hedge, Frederick H., 397. 
Hedley's Locomotive, *56. 
Helmholtz, Professor, 316-318. 
Hennessy, W. J., 413. 

Henry, Patrick, declaiming against the Episcopacy, 33. 
Hepworth v. Griswold Case decided, 258. 
Herman, A., 26. 
Herrick, E. C, 310. 

Herschel's, Sir William, Discoveries, 298, 
Hewitt, A. S., 195. 
Higginson, Thomas W., 394. 
Hildreth, Richard, 382. 
Billiard, George S., 397. 
Hiudostau, Iron Furnace at, *GS. 
Historical Painting, 410, 411. 
Hoe and Plow, Origin of the, *43. 
Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 393. 

Holland furnishing Stone for Building Purposes, 34. 
Holland, J. G., 394. 
Holmes, Mary J., 394. 
Holmes, Obadiah, 232. 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 374, 375. 
Homestead Laws, 449. 
Hopkins, L., 415. 
Hopkins, Samuel, 35S, 359. 
Hopkinson, Francis, 356, 357. 
Hoppin, Augustus, 414. 
Hosmer, Harriet, 414. 
Hough, George W.,300, 301. 
Howard's Plow, *45. 
Howe, Julia Ward, 370. 
Howe, William, 35. 
Howe's Sewing-machine, 94. 
Howell, Elizabeth Lloyd, 395. 
32 



Howells, William D., 391. 

Howley, Bishop, 492. 

Hoyt, J. W., 291. 

Hubbard, Richard W., 412. 

Hughes, Archbishop, 284, 4S3. 

Humanitarian Progress, 454 - 472 :— The Prisons and 
Management of Criminals, 454, 455 ; Edward Liv- 
ingston, 455 ; Overcrowded Prisons, 456-458 ; Impris- 
onment of Debtors, 45S-460 ; Severity of Penalties, 
460, 461 ; County Prisons, 461 ; Reform of the Prison 
System. 461-463 ; Religious Instruction in Prisons, 
463,464; Secular Teaching, Libraries, and Treat- 
ment of Criminal and Unfortunate Children, 464, 
465 ; Prevention of Children's Crime, and the Chil- 
dren's Aid Society, 465-468 ; Treatment of Lunatics, 
Miss Dix'sand Dr. Willard's Reports, and the " Wil- 
lard Asylum," 468^171; Review of the Prison Sys- 
tem, and Treatment of the Blind, the Deaf and 
Dumb, and the Idiotic, 471, 472. 

Hunt, Helen, 396. 

Hunt, Rev. John, 4S0, 481. 

Hunt's Scientific Progress, 308, 309. 

Hunter, John, 423. 

Huntington, Daniel, 410-412. 

Hurd's Centrifugal Filter,* 110. 

Hurricanes, Atlantic, 315. 

Hussey's Reaping-machine, 47, 48. 

Huskisson killed by the famous " Rocket " Steam-eu- 
giue, 5S. 

Hyperion, the Eighth Satellite of Saturn, 29S. 

I. 

Ice, 108, 109 ; Ice-making Machine, *109. 

Idiotic, Treatment of the, 472. 

Illiteracy, 2S7. 

Illinois and St. Louis Iron Bridge, *86. 

India Rubber, 113, 114. 

Indiana, Currency of, Description of, 253. 

Indians, The, under Onondaga, 2S. 

Induction Coils, 329, 330. 

Industrial Education, 291. 

Industries, Colonial, 157 ; Relative Importance of, 171, 
172. 

Infidelity, 359. 

Ingham, C. C, 409. 

Inmai), Portrait of, 409; Sketch of, 410. 

Inness, George, 412. 

Insane, Asylums for, and Treatment of, 408^171. 

Intemperance and Drunkenness, 47S. 

Interstate Migration, Map Illustrating, 235. 

Inventions and Inventors: — Ship -building, 39; Ark- 
wright's Mill Spinning System, 40, *42 ; Jacob Per- 
kins's Nail -cutting Machine, Coin -die, Whitney's 
Cotton-gin, Whittemore's Card -sticking Machine, 
40; Newcomen's Steam-engine, 40, *51; Rotherham 
Plow, 44; Plows, by Thomas Jeffersou, Newbold, 
Peacock, Ransome, Jethro Wood,* Timothy Pick- 
ering, Gibb, Howard,* Small,* Aaron Smith, 45; and 
Fowler, *46 ; Reaping - machines, by Gladstone, 
Mann, Ogle, Bell, Samuel Lane, Hussey, M'Cor- 
mick, and Haines, 47, *48 ; Threshing-machines, 
by Andrew Meikle,* Menzies, Stirling, and the 
American "Champion,"* Cornish Pumping Steam- 
engine, *52 ; Steamboats — Symington's Charlotte 
Dundas* Fulton's Clermont, *53 ; Bell's Comet,* 
Ericsson's Screw- propeller, and Steam -ship City 
of Peking,* 54; Locomotives, by Trevethick and 
Vivian, *55 ; Oliver Evans, Bleukinsopp, *56; Wil- 
liam Hedley,* George Stephenson, *57 ; " The 
Rocket," *58 ; Horatio Allen and Peter Cooper, 59; 
Cotton-gin, by Eli Whitney,* Carding-machines, by 



498 



INDEX. 



Lewis Paul, Hargreaves,* Samuel Slater, Arkwright, 
and Peel,* Card-sticking Machine, by Amos Whitte- 
more, 01 ; Spinning-wheels, 61-*63; Spinning-jenny, 
by James Hargreaves, *63 ; Mule-spiuuer, by Sam- 
uel Cromptou, *65 ; Power -looms, by Richard Ed- 
ward Cartwright, Fancy Loom, by Samuel Cromp- 
ton,* Jacquard Loom, 66; Dyeing-machine, by Rob- 
ert Peele, 67 ; Hindostan Iron Furnaces, *08 ; " Pine- 
tree Coinage," 70 ; Heury Cort's Puddling Furnace, 
*71 ; R. L. Stevens's, of Hoboken, Contract for 
Iron-clad War-vessel, Iron-clad Vessels, Nasmyth's 
Steam-hammer, *72; Bessemer Process, *72-74; 
Cast-steel invented by Benjamin Huntsman, Watt's 
first Steam-engine, Ramsdeu's Micromeier Screw- 
dividing Engine, 74; Bramah's Lock, 74, 75; Gener- 
al Sir S. Benthani's Turning-lathe, 75; Joseph Whit- 
worth's "Jim Crow" Plauing-machiue, Fire-arms, 
by John H. Hall, Colonel Colt, Pratt, and Whitney, 
76; Bank-note Engraving, by Jacob Perkins,* Post- 
age and Revenue Stamps, 77 ; Watch - making, by 
John Harrison, and the Waltham Factory, 77, 78; 
Telescopes, by John Dollond, and at the Washing- 
ton Observatory,* The Contact Level, by Repsold, 
78 ; Micrometer Gauge, by Whitworth, *79 ; Sesostris 
Canal, Suez Canal, Steam-dredges of M. De Lesseps, 
The Pharos of Alexandria, Light-houses, Smeaton's 
Eddystone, Stephenson's Bell Rock, Tour de Cor- 
duan, Pile-driving, Trajan's Bridge across the Dan- 
ube, Diving-bell, by Smeaton, 80; Caissons, Pnm- 
matic, by M. Triger, SO ; at Copenhagen,* at East 
River Bridge, New York,* Improvements in, by 
James B. Eads, Colonel and W. A. Roebling, 81; 
Floating Derrick, at New York, *82; Bermuda Float- 
ing Dock, *S2, 83; Steam-pumps and Chain-pumps, 
*S3, 84; Tunneling, Mont Cenis and Hoosac Tun- 
nels, Hallet's Drilling for Excavations, *S5 ; Iron 
Structures, Sir Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, 
New York Grand Central Railway Depot, and the 
St. Pancras Railway Station, London, 86; Iron and 
Tubular Bridges,* Menai Straits, Southwark, Illi- 
nois and St. Louis,* Washington Aqueduct, erected 
by General Meigs, Fairmouut, Niagara Falls, Cin- 
cinnati, St. Lawrence, 86-88 ; Wood-working, SS-92 ; 
Saws, General Sir Samuel Bentham's Patents, *S9 ; 
Scroll-aud-band Saw,* Planing and Moulding Ma- 
chine,* Joiner, Brunei's Shell -mortising Machine, 
90, 91; Blanchard's Spoke-lathes* and Wood-turn- 
ing Lathes, *91, 92; Elevators, 93 ; Sewing-machines, 
by Thomas Saint, Thimonnier, Elias Howe, Singer,* 
and M'Kay, 94-96 ; Lamb's Knitting-machine,* Ap- 
ple-paring, and other domestic Machines, 96 ; Safes, 
by Chubb, Wilder, Lillie, and Herring, 97 ; Fire-arms 
and Ordnance, The Tzar Pooschka, Woolwich, Arm- 
strong, Krupp, Rodman, Gatling, Taylor,* Martini, 
and Heury Guns, 97-100 ; Telegraph, System of, by 
Polybius, Morse,* Cooke, Wheatstone, and Bain, 
100-102 ; Electroplating, Experiments in,* by Volta, 
Cruikshank, Wollaston, Spencer, and Jacopi, 102, 
103 ; Electric Light,* noticed by Greener and Staite, 
used at Dungenness Light-house, in England, and La 
Heve, France, 103, 104 ; Fire-engines, The " Wash- 
ington" No. 1, and Inventions in, by Newsham, Er- 
icsson, Latta, and Shawk, 104; Fire-alarms, by 
Farmer and Channing, Atmospheric Railways, Iu- 
ventious in, by Papiu, Medhurst, and Vallance, 105; 
Atmospheric Brakes and Blowers and Blowing-en- 
gines, 106 ; Balloons, Ascensions in, by the Montgol- 
riers, Pilatre de Roziere, Marquis d'Arlandes, Ro- 
main, Glaisher, Green, Wise, Donaldson, M. Go- 
dard, and De Lome, 106,107; Weighing-machines, 
by the Fairbauk Brothers, 107 ; Gas,* Inventions in, 



by Clayton, Murdock, and Winsor, 107, 108; Stete- 
feldt's Roasting-furnace,* 108; Silver, and its Proc- 
esses, 10S ; Ice, Ferdinand's Machine* for making, 
109; Sugar, Charles E. Howard's Vacuum -pan,* 
and Hurd's Centrifugal Filter,* 109, 110; Porcelain, 
and Wedgwood's Improvements in, 110; Glass, 
Egyptiau Machines for making,* Chance and Co.'s 
Cylinder Glass, and Tilghmau's Sand-blast for cut- 
ting, 111, 112; Paper and Paper -making Machin- 
ery, by Robert,* Fourdrinier, and Dickinson, 112, 
113; India Rubber, Charles Goodyear's experiments 
with, 113, 114; Meteorological Instruments and the 
Barograph, *114, 115 ; Anaesthetics; Ether and Chlo- 
roform ; Artificial Limbs, *115; Aquaria, Construc- 
tions, by R. Warrington, N. B. Ward, and at Brigh- 
ton, England; Lucifer- matches, 115, 116; Musical 
Instruments; Organs and Pianos, 116, 117; Printing, 
Types, aud Type -founding,; Egyptian and Cunei- 
form, Ideographic and Syllabic, *118; Phoenician 
and Egyptian Writing on Stone, *119; and Inven- 
tions by Peter Schoeffer, William Caxton, Christo- 
pher Saur, Benjamiu Franklin, and David Bruce, 
*117-123; Type Setting and Distributing Machines, 
Inventions in, by Alden, Kastenbein, aud Paige, 
*123, 124; Stereotyping,* Inventions in, by William 
Ged, Carez, Didot, and David Bruce, 124-126 ; Elec- 
trotyping, by J. A. Adams and Silas P. Knight, 
*126-12S; Printing-press Inventions and Improve- 
ments, by B. Franklin,* Lord Stanhope,* Blaew, 
George Clymer,* Peter Smith, Samuel Rust, Nichol- 
son, Konig, Doukin,* Bacon, Applegath, Cowper, 
Daniel Treadwell, Adams,* Hoe,* Campbell,* Gor- 
don,* Walter,* and William Bullock, *12S-135 ; Fold- 
ing-machines, by Chambers, *135; Addressing-ma- 
chines, *135, 136; Printing for the Blind, 136; En- 
graving, and Wilson Lowry's Ruling -machine, 136, 
137; Lithography, originated by Alois Senefelder,* 
and Improvements by Hoe, *137-140 ; Photography, 
Inventions in, by Wedgwood, J. N. Niepce, F. Tal- 
bot, Daguerre, Clandet, Scott Archer, Dr. J. W. Dra- 
per, G. P. Bond, Rutherford, Delarue, and Bellows, 
*140-142; Copying Camera, by Osborne, *142; Pho- 
tolithography, Inventions in, by Joseph Dixon and 
J. W. Osborne, 142-144 ; Miscellaneous Photo-proc- 
esses and Discoveries, by Mungo Ponton, Paul 
Pretsch ; the Albert-type, the Autotype, and the Helo- 
type, Fox Talbot's Photoglyptic Process, aud the 
Woodbury Process, 144, 145 ; Photo-micrography, Dr. 
Woodward's,* W. Webb's inventions in, 145, 146; 
Paper-making, by John Ames, 10S ; Cheese-factory 
System, by Jesse Williams, 1S3 ; Cambridge Observ- 
atory Telescope, 29S ; Mr. Alvan Clark's great Tele- 
scope, 299; Electro -magnetic Clock, by Professor 
John Locke, Telegraph Registers, by Professors 
Morse and Mitchell, Messrs. Joseph Saxton, W. C, 
and George P. Bond, 300; Printing Chronograph, 
by Professor George W. Hough, 300 ; The 12$ inch 
Equatorial, by Mr. Henry Fitz, 301 ; Telescopes, and 
Objectives for Microscopes discovered by Charles A. 
Spencer, 301 ; Optical Experiments, by Alvan Clark, 
301, 302 ; Photographic Apparatus, by L. M. Ruther- 
ford, 302, 303 ; Telescopes, by Dr. J. W. Draper, 303, 
304 ; Stereoscope, by Sir C. Wheatstone, 323 ; Arti- 
ficial Production of Cold, by Professor A. C. Turn- 
ing, Mr. Tellier, and Mr. Carre, 323 ; Microscope, by 
J. J. Lister, C. S. Spencer, and Professor Bailey, 
323 ; Magnetic Telegraph, by Professor S. B. Morse, 
and Atlantic Telegraph, completed under the Presi- 
dency of Cyrus W. Field, 326; Electro -magnetic 
Clock, by E. S. Ritchie, 327; Magneto -electric Ma- 
chines, by Joseph Saxton aud Dr. Page, 32S ; In- 



INDEX. 



499 



duction Coils, by Dr. Page, Mr. Ruhrukorff, and Mr. 
Ritchie, 329, 330 ; Compouud Blow-pipe, by Robert 
Hare, 332 ; Stethoscope, by Rene T. H. Laennec, 421 ; 
Wuuderlich's Improvements in the Thermometer, 
421. 

Ireland forbidden to receive American Produce, 25. 

Iron, Discovery of, in large Quantities, 27; and its 
Uses, Furnace of the Kols, Hiudostan, *6S ; Truss 
and Lattice Bridge, 6S-79, *88, 192-195; Bessemer 
Casting Process, 72-74 ; Industries in, 155. 

Iron-clad Vessels, 72. 

Irving, Washington, 37, 3C3. 



Jackson, Andrew, Reform in Finance under, 246. 

Jackson, C.T.,426. 

Jackson, James, 428. 

James, Henry, 397. 

James, Henry, Jun., 394. 

Jamestown, Virginia, Settlement at, 150, 214. 

Jandon, Mr., 251. 

Jarvis, Dr. Edward, 235. 

Jarvis, John Wesley, 409. 

Jay, John, 37, 353, 354. 

Jefferson, Thomas, 33, 45, 352. 

Jefferson's Plows, 45. 

Johnson, E., 33, 413. 

Johnston, James F. W., 179. 

Journalism, 36, 120, 1S4; Reform needed in, 276; Med- 
ical, 41S. 

Judd, Sylvester, 394. 

Jurisprudence, American, 434-453: — The American 
Law Library, 434-436; Jurisprudence in Colonial 
Times, 436, 437 ; Written Constitutions, 437, 438 ; The 
Twofold Court System, 438-441 ; Our Admiralty Ju- 
risdiction, 441 -443 ; Patents and Copyrights, 443, 
444 ; Extradition of Criminals, 444, 445; Bankruptcy, 
445-447 ; California Land Claims, 447, 448 ; Rights of 
Married Women, 448, 449; Homestead and Exemp- 
tion Laws, 449 ; Mechanics' Lien Laws, 44'.), 450 ; Pro. 
tectiou of Animals, 450 ; Reformed Procedure, 450, 
451; Codes and Revised Statutes, 451 ; Brief Retro- 
spect and Conclusion, 451, 452. 

K. 

Kendall, Amos, 230. 

Kenrick, Archbishop, 4S3. 

Kensett, John Frederick, Portrait of, 414 ; Sketch of, 
412, 413. 

Kentucky and Tennessee invaded by Indians, 19; Col- 
onized by Daniel Boone, 219. 

Kimball, R. B., 393. 

King, James G., 251. 

King, Thomas Starr, 397. 

Kirk, John Foster, 383, 3S4. 

Kirkwood, D., 307, 30S. 

Kliukerfues's Scientific Researches, 311, 314. 

Kuight's Black-leading Machine, "127, 12S. 

Knitting-machines, *96. 

Kowalski's Theory of Neptune, 304. 

L. 

Labor saved to the Artisan by Machinery, 208, 209. 

Laborers, Social Condition of, 172, 173; Wages of, 173. 

Lacaille's Histoire Celeste, 304. 

Laennec, Rene Theodore Hyacinthe, 421. 

Lalaude Medal presented to Mr. A. Clark, 299. 

Lamb's Knitting-machine, *96. 

Lancaster, Joseph, 283. 

Land Claims in California, 447, 448. 

Landscape Painting, 412,413. 



Lane's, Samuel, Reaping-machine, 47, 48. 

Langley's Scientific Researches, 30S, 309. 

Larcom, Lucy, 395. 

LasselPs Discoveries, 29S. 

Lathe, Blauchard's Spoke, *92. 

Laurens, John, 474, 475. 

Law, Library of, 434-436. 

Le Clear, Thomas, 410. 

Lee, Henry, 35. 

Lehigh Valley, 27. 

Lelaud, Charles G., 390. 

Leutze, Emanuel, 411. 

Liebig, Justus von, 179. 

Lien Laws, Mechanics', 449, 450. 

Light-houses : Eddystoue, Bell Rock, Tour de Cordu- 
an, South Forland, Portland, and Lundy Island, 80 ; 
Dunstan Pillar, 179. 

Lincoln, Abraham, Election of, 255; Oration of, at 
Gettysburg, 388, 3S9. 

Lippincott, Mrs. (Grace Greenwood), 396. 

Liquidation under Difficulties, 1819-1823, 245. 

Lister, J. J., 323, 324. 

Literature, American, A Century of, 349-398: — Jona- 
than Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, 349-351; 
Thomas Jefferson, 352 ; The " Federalist " the Po- 
litical Classic of the United States, Contributions 
to, by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, 353 ; Alexander 
Hamilton killed in a duel with Aaron Burr, John 
Jay noted for his Personal Integrity, and James 
Madison for the " Resolutions of '98," 354 ; Superior 
Abilities displayed by Fisher Ames, 355; Early Po- 
ets—Timothy Dwight, Philip Freneau, John Trum- 
bull, Francis Hopkinson, R. T. Paine, Jun., and Joel 
Barlow, 356, 357 ; Early Novelists— Susanna Rowson, 
H. H. Brackenridge, and C. B. Brown, 357, 358 ; Ear- 
ly Theological Writers— Samuel Hopkins, Nathaniel 
Emmons, Ethan Allen, and Calvinistic Theology, 
358,359; Thomas Paine the Great Opponent of the 
Orthodox Faith, 359 ; William Cullen Bryant and his 
Works, 359, 360 ; Richard Henry Daua, 362 ; Wash- 
ington Irving and his Writings, 363 ; James Feui- 
more Cooper and the Characteristics of his Writ- 
ings, 364, 365 ; Joseph Rodman Drake, Fitz-Greeue 
Halleck, and James K. Paulding, 365, 366 ; Revival 
of Spiritual Sentiment in New England, 366, 367; 
Jonathan Mayhew, William Ellery Channing, An- 
drews Norton, and their Teachings, 367, 368; Uui- 
tarianism and Orville Dewey and Theodore Parker, 
368; Ralph Waldo Emerson, 368-371 ; Theodore Par- 
ker, 371, 372; Heury Wadsworth Longfellow, 372, 
373; John Greenleaf Whittier, 373, 374; Oliver Wen- 
dell Holmes, 374,375; James Russell Lowell, 375; 
Julia Ward Howe, 376 ; Charles Sprague, 376, 377 ; 
Nathaniel Parker Willis, 377, 378 ; James G. Perci- 
val, 37S, 379 ; Edgar Allan Poe, 379 ; Bayard Taylor, 
379, 380; George William Curtis, 380, 3S1 ; Jared 
Sparks, C. F. Adams, and Hamilton's Works, 381; 
George F. Bancroft, 3S1, 382 ; Richard Hildreth, John 
G. Palfrey, and Francis Parkman, 382 ; William H. 
Prescott, 382, 383 ; John Lothrop Motley, 383 ; John 
Foster Kirk, 3S3, 3S4 ; Life and Correspondence of 
Nathaniel Greene by George W. Greene, Dr. John 
W. Draper, Parke Godwin, James Parton, Edmund 
Quincy, and William C. Rives, 384; General \V. T. 
Sherman, 384, 3S5 ; George Ticknor, 3S5 ; William R. 
Alger, and John C. Calhoun, 3S6 ; Daniel Webster, 
386,387; Charles Snmner, 3*7, :;ss ; Edward Everett, 
Abraham Lincoln's noted Oration at Gettysburg, 
3SS, 3S9 ; Henry D. Thoreau, A. Bronson Alcott, Walt 
Whitman, and Joaquin Miller, 389 ; George H. Der- 
by (John Phoenix), Charles F. Browne (Artenius 



500 



INDEX. 



Ward), S. L. Clemens (Murk Twain), D. R. Locke 
(Petroleum V. Nasby), II. W. Shaw (Josh Killing*), 
Charles G. Lelaud.and P. Bret Harte,390; John Hay, 
William 1). HowellS, Charles Dudley Warner, and 
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 891 ; Nathaniel Hawthorne, 
391-393; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catherine M. Sedg- 
wick, William Ware, Charles Feu no Hoffman, R. B. 
Kimball, and I). maid <;. .Mitchell, 393; Sylvester 
Judd, Thomas W. Higginson, Harriet Prescott Spof- 
ford, Maria L. Cummins, E. S. Phelps, Henry James, 
Jan., J. vv. De Forest, Edward Everett Hale, Louisa 
M. Alcott, A. H. T. Whitney, William Q. Simms, The- 
odore Wintbrop, J. G. Holland, Mary J. Holmes, 
Mrs. Terhune (Marian Harland), and Augusta Evans 
Wilson, 894; Maria Brooks (Maria del Occidente), 
T. VV. Parsons, Lucy Larcom, A. 15. Street, Epes Sar- 
gent, George P. Morris, Joseph 11. Clinch, A. G. 
Greene, B. II. Wilde, John Howard Payne, E. II. 
Sears, Samuel Wood worth, Elizabeth Lloyd Howell, 
Robert Lowell, Porceythe Wilson, J. T. Trowbridge, 
('. P. ('ranch, Mrs. Drinker (Edith May), George H. 
Boker, Richard Henry Stoddard/r. Buchanan Read, 
w. W. story, and Prances s. Osgood, 395; Mrs. M. J. 

Preston, Henry Timrod, Paul II. Ilayne, John G. 

Saxe, Edmund ( llarence Stedman, Helen Hunt, Jones 
Very.Celia Thaxter, Mrs. Lippincott (Grace Green- 
wood), Alice and Phoebe Cary, Mrs. L. C. Moulton, 
R. W. Griswold, E. A. and (i. L. Duyckinck, John s. 
Hart, F. II. Underwood, Henry T.Tuckerman, Rich- 
ard Granl While, Henry Giles, s. A. Allibone, and 
George P. Marsh, 396; Theological Literature and 
Henry Ward Beecher, Francis Wayland, Leonard 
Bacon, Edwards A. Park, Frederick II. Hedge, Hor- 
ace Bushnell and Cyrus A. Bartol, 897; Richard 
Henry Dana, Jim., George S. Ililliard, Charles K. 
Norton, Thomas Starr King, Charles T. Brooks, 
Horace Mann, Henry James, Mary A. Dodge (Gail 
Hamilton), Margaret Fuller Ossoli, James T. Fields, 
John Fiske, and Herbert Spencer, 397, 398. 

Literature, Early, 37 ; Medical, 418, 420 ; Library of 
Law, 434 136. 

Lithography, 137-140; Lithographic Hand-press, *137 ; 
Hoe'j Lithographic Press,*189. 

Livingston, Edward, 466. 

Livingston, Rev. Dr. J. 1L, 481. 

Lobelia, The, 428. 

Lock, Bramah's Patent, 74. 

Locke, D. R. (Petroleum V. Nasby), 390. 

Locke, Professor J., 300. 

Locomotives, *66-60. 

Loewy's Scientific Researches, 308, 309. 

London Bridge, Water-wheel at, in 1731, *S4. 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 372, 373. 

Long Island, the Garden of America, '23; Settlement, 
215. 

Longitudinal Determinations, 801. 

Loomis, Professor, 308, 309. 

Looms, Weaving, '65, GO. 

Louisiana, Annexation of, 213. 

Loverillg, Professor, 310. 
Lowell, James Russell, 375. 

Lowell, Robert, 395. 
Lucifer-matches, 1 16. 

Lunatics, Asylums for, and Treatment of, 468-471. 
Lundy Island Light-house, 80. 
Lutherans, The, 482. 

M. 
Machinery, Domestic, 93-97; Saving of Labor to the 

Artisan, '.'u>, 209. 

:, 354. 



Magneto-electricity, 328, 329. 

Maine, First Settlement in, '215. 

Malthus, T. R., 209. 

Mann, Horace, 285, 397. 

Mann's Reaping-machine, 47, 48. 

Mansfield, W. M.,33. 

Manufacture, Progress in, 147-173:— What are Manu- 
factures? 147; Sources of Information, 147-150; Prog- 
ress from 1007 to 1770, 150-150; True Cause of the 
Revolution, 150-159; Tench Coxe's Address on the 
"Encouragement, of Manufactures," 100; Washing- 
ton's Dress at his First Congress, and Hamilton's 
Famous Report on the Progress in Manufactures, 
101 ; Samuel Slatei and his Manufactures, 104, 105; 
Statistics of Cotton Goods Manufactured in the 
United States in 1873-74, 100; Results of the War 
of 1812, 166, 167; Value of Manufactured Products 
exported, and Books and Paper-making, 168; Iron 
ami steel, 109; Woolen Goods, 170, 171 ; Relative 
Importance of the Manufacturing Industries, 171, 
172; Number of Persons Employed, 172; Social Cou- 
dition of Laborers, 172, 173. 

Manufactures, Colonial, forbidden, 20; Encourage- 
ment of, Address by Tench Coxe, 160. 

Manuring, 179, 180. 

Maps — Showing the Acquisition of Territory, 1776- 
1808, 212 ; Showing the Progress of Settlement East 
of the 100th Meridian, 221 ; Showing Progress West- 
ward of the Centre of Population from Baltimore, 
1800-1S70, 227: Illustrating Interstate Migration, 
235 ; Showing Density of Population, 237. 

Married Women, Rights of, 448, 449. 

Marsh, George P., 390. 

Maryland in 1775,22; Settlement of, 214; Roman Ca- 
tholicism first introduced into, 483. 

Mason, Jeremiah, 246. 

Massachusetts, Class feeling in, 17; Prosperity of, in 
177r,, 22. 

Mather, Cotton, 30, 37. 

Matteson, J.,413. 

Manch < 'hunk Mountain, 27. 

Maxwell, J. C., 307, 308. 

May, Edith (Mrs. Drinker), 395. 

Mayer, A. M., 808, 809, 316-318. 

Mayhew, Jonathan, opposition of, to Episcopal Tyr- 
anny, 31, 32; Opposition to Calvinism, 300, 307. 

M'Closkey, Cardinal, 483. 

M'Cormick's Reaping-machine, *47, 48. 

M'Dowell, Ephraim, 422. 

M'Eutee, Jervis, 412. 

Mechanical Progress, 36, 39-146: — Printing-press, 36; 
Cotton-mills, and Exportation Of English Machin- 
ery prohibited, 40; Newcomen Engine, and Watt's 
Engine, -11 ; The Factory System, Richard Ark- 
wright, and Cotton-machinery, 42 ; Agricultural Im- 
plements, 43-50; Steam-engines, 50-00; Cotton 
Manufacture, 00-08; Iron, 68-79; Engineering, 80- 
3S; Wood-working, 8S-92 ; Elevators, 92,93; Do- 
mestic Machinery, 93-97; Fire-arms and Ordnance, 
'a? mo; Telegraphs, 100, 102; Electroplating, 102, 
103; Electric Light, 103, 104 ; Fire-engines and fire- 
alarms, 104, 1U5; Atmospheric Railways, 105, 106; 
Balloons, 106, 107; Weighing-machines, L07; Gas, 

107, lUS; Silver, His; lee. Ins, lo(i : Sugar, 109, 110; 

Porcelain, L10; Glass, 111, 112; Paper, 112, 113; In- 
dia Rubber, 118, 114; Meteorological Instruments, 
114, 115; Anaesthetics and Artificial Limbs, 115; 
Aquaria and Lucifer matches, 116, 116; Musical In- 
struments, 110, 117; Printing, 117-120; Type, 120- 
124; Stereotyping, 121 120; Electrotyping, 126-128; 
Printing -press, 128, 135; Folding- machines, 135; 



INDEX. 



501 



Addressing -machines, 135, 136; Printing for the 
Blind, 130; Engraving, 136, 187; Lithography, 137- 
140; Photography, 140-142 ; Photolithography, 142- 
144; Miscellaneous Photo -processes, 144, 145; Pho- 
to-micrography, 145, 140. 

Mechanics' Lien Laws, 449, 450. 

Medal, Lalande, presented to Mr. A. ('lark, 209. 

Medical and Sanitary Progress, 410-433: — Colleges and 
Education, 417; Societies, 417, 418; Literature and 
Journalism, 418-420 ; Writings of Benjamin Rush, 
41 S ; Edward Jenner and Vaccination, 420, 421 ; Pro- 
fessor Benjamin Waterhouse and Dr. Valentine 
Seaman, 421 ; R. T. II. Laennec's Discovery of Aus- 
cultation, 421 ; Wunderiich's Improvements in the 
Thermometer, 421, 422; Operation in Ovariotomy, 
performed hy Ephraim M'Dowell and others, 422; 
Important Surgical Operations by John Hunter, 
Stevens in Santa Cruz, Atkinson in England, 8. 
Pomeroy White, Valentine Mott, Sir Astley Cooper, 
Reuben Dimond Mussey, Wright Post, A. W. Smyth, 
and William Beaumont, 423, 424; Application of 

Anaesthesia by Sir James Y"oung Simpson, Horace 
Wells, C. T. Jackson, and John < '. Morton, 425, 426 ; 
Improvements in Surgery by Nathan Smith, W. W. 
Reid, Guidon Buck, If. I. Bowditch, Daniel Brain- 
ard, John C. Warren, George Hayward, Henry F. 
Bigelow, James K. Wood, J. Marion Sims, James I'. 
White, T. G. Thomas, James Jackson, John Ware, 
George 15. Wood, J. R. Mitchell, Elisha Bartlett, 
Alonzo Clark, Daniel Drake, and Jacob Bigelow, 
427, 428 ; The Lobelia, or Indian Tobacco, introduced 
by Rev. Dr. Cutter, and Guthrie's Discovery of Chlo- 
roform, 428; Important Contributions to Materia 
Medica by Dr. Steams, John C. Dalton, S. Weir 
Mitchell, Brown-Sequard, Guthrie, and Austin Flint, 
Jan., 428, 429; Changes in Practice, Anticipations, 
Progress of Medicine, and Prevention of Disease, 
429-433. 

Medical Colleges and Education, 410 ; Societies, 417, 
■lis; Literature, 41s 120. 

Meikle's, Andrew, Threshing-machine, *49, 52. 

Menzies's Threshing-machine, 52. 

Meteorological Instruments, 114, 115. 

Meteorology, 314-310. 

Meteors, 311-314. 

Methodism, 477, 482. 

Michaelius, Rev. Jonas, 481. 

Micrometer Gauge, The, 79. 

Micro-photographic Apparatus, Woodward's, "115. 

Microscope, The, 323, 324. 

Migration, Interstate, 236; Map Illustrating, 235. 

Miller, Joaquin, 389. 

Mineralogy, 341,342. 

Mineral Resources, Development of, 185-199 : — Deposits 
of Coal, 185-1-9; Petroleum, Mineral oil, 189 I 12; 
Iron, 192-195; Copper, and Copper Mines, 195-197; 
Gold and Silver, 197 199. 

Minerals, Discovery of, 28. 

Mitchell, Donald G.,393. 

Mitchell, J. K.,428. 

Mitchell, Maria, 299, 300. 

Mitchell, Samuel P., 184. 

Mitchell, S. Weir. 428, 429. 

Monetary Development, 238-260: —Barter Currency, 
Coinage and Paper Bills, 238, '-'39 ; Bills of Exchange, 
240 ; Taxation imposed, The Treasury Department, 
National Bank established, and ' loinage, 211 ; Bank- 
ruptcy Law passed, 242 ; War Debt of 1812, 243 ; Liq- 
uidation under Difficulties, 1819-1823, 245; Reform 
of the Government under Andrew Jackson, 240; 
Bank recharlered, 247, 248 ; Financial Crisis in 1836, 



249; "Bills Receivable," 250; Suspension of tin: 
Banks in 1839,251; Comparative Dank Statements, 
252; Indiana Currency, Discovery of Gold in Cali- 
fornia, 253; Panic in 1857, 254; Morrill Tariff and 
the Situation in 1801, 255; Stamps used as Currency, 
Fractional Currency, and National Bank Act of Feb- 
ruary 25, 1863, 256 ; Congressional Restrictions on 
the Currency, and Tea and Coffee Duties Repealed, 
257; Hepworth v. Griswold case decided, "Black 
Friday" and Failure of Jay Cooke, & Co., 258; 
Panic of 1S73, 258, 259; Suspension of the Union 
Trust Company, Of Paper Payments by the Hanks, 
and the Outlook, 259. 

Moody and Sankey Revival, 488. 

Moran, Peter, 414. 

Moran, Tl ias, 414. 

Moravians, The, 232. 

Morrill Tariff, 255. 

Mori i , George I'., 395. 

Morse, S. F. I'.., Telegraphic Inventions by, "102 ; Por- 
trait, 408 ; Sketch of, 300, 409. 

Morton, John C, 426. 

Motley, John Lothrop, 383. 

Moit, Valentine, 423. 

Moulding-machine, "90. 

Moulton,Mrs. L. ('., 396. 

Mount, S., ii::. 

Mountains, Rocky, 185. 

Mule-spinner, *65. 

Musical Instruments, no, 117. 

Mussey, Reuben Dimond, 423. 

N. 

Nasby, Petroleum V. (D. R. Locke), 390. 

Nasmyth's Steam-hammer, "72. 

Nasi., Thomas, 414. 

National Growth, 220,227. 

Natural Sciences, The, First Steps In, 337, 338 ; Socie- 
ties and Local Development, 338, 339 ; General Ex- 
plorations, 339, 340; Mineralogy, 341, 312; Botany, 
342, 343; Zoology, 313 310; Paleontology, 346, 347; 
Geology, 347,348. 

Nautical Chronometers, Transportation of, 301. 

" Navigation Act" of 1050, 157. 

Neale, Thomas, 229. 

Neptune, Theory of, hy Kowalski, 304; hy Newcomb, 
305. 

New Amsterdam, Settlement formed, called, 215. 

Newbold's Flow, 45. 

New comb's Ephemerides and Theory of Neptune, 304, 
305. 

Newcomen, Steam-engine of, *40, 51. 

New England, Democracy in, 20; Dutch in Albany, 20, 
21 ; Character of the Clergy of, 31 ; Schools in, 281 ; 
Revival of Spiritual Sentiment, 866. 

New Hampshire, Settlement in, 215. 

New Haven, Sell lenient in, 215. 

New Jersey, Princeton College, 23 ; Formation of the 

Colony of, 210. 

New Mexico, Annexation of, 213. 

Newspaper- first printed in America in 1704,30. 

Newton, Gilbert Stuart, 409. 

Newton's Scientific Researches, 311-314. 

New Voik, Fast River Bridge, Caisson at, *81. 

New York, Imperfect Agriculture In, 18 ; Aristocratic 
and Religious Tendencies of, Condition of, in 1774, 
33; Schools of, 281 ; Common-school System in, 282- 
284 ; Academy of Fine Arts, 402; National Academy 
of Design, 403; Fulton Street Prayer-meeting, 488, 

Niles, II., 21 1, 245. 

Nobert, F. A., 319-321. 



502 



INDEX. 



Normal Schools, Establishment of, 2S5. 
Norton, Andrews, 367, 36S. 
Norton, Charles E., 39T. 
Norton, John P., 184. 
Novelists, Early, 35T, 358. 
Nullification, Doctrine of, 267. 

O. 

Ogle's Reaping-machine, 47, 48. 
Oil, Mineral, 189-192. 
Olmsted, Professor, 311-314. 
Optics, Science of, 31S, 319. 
Ordnance and Fire-arms, 97-100. 
Organic Chemistry, 331, 332. 
Organs, 116, 117. 

Osborne's Copying Camera, *143. 
( >sgi iod, Prances S., 395. 
Ossoli, Margaret Fuller, 398. 
Otis, James, 33. 
Ovariotomy, 422. 

P. 

Pacific Coast Settlements, 228, 229. 

Page, William, 410. 

Paine, R. T., Jun.,356, 357. 

Paine, Thomas, on Separation from England, 23 ; As- 
sailant of the Orthodox Faith, 359. 

Painting and Painters :— Portrait, 406, 407 ; Genre, 410, 
411 ; Historical, 411 ; Landscape, 412. 

Paleontology, 346, 347. 

Palfrey, John G., 3S2. 

Palmer, Erastus Dow, 414. 

Panic of 1857, 254 ; of 1S73, 25S, 259. 

Papacy, Dangers from the Increase of, 275. 

Paper and Paper-making Machinery, 112, 113; Manu- 
facture, 153; Making, 169; Currency, 23S, 239 ; Pay- 
ments suspended by the Banks, 259. 

Park, Edward A., 397. 

Parker, Theodore, 371, 372. 

Parkman, Francis, 382. 

Parsons, T. W., 395. 

Patent-office, Washington, *39. 

Patents since 16S0, 42, 443, 444. 

Paulding, James K., 365, 360. 

Payne, John Howard, 395. 

Peacock's Plow, 45. 

Peale, Charles Wilson, 408. 

Peale, Rembrandt, Portrait of, 405 ; Sketch of, 409. 

Peck, Jedediah, 2S2, 2S3. 

Peirce, Benjamin, 297. 

Penalties, Severity of, 460, 461. 

Penn, William, 36. 

Pennsylvania, Conservative Government in, 23; Col- 
onization of, 217. 

Percival, James G., 37S, 379. 

Perkins's, Jacob, Nail-cutting Machine, and Coin-die, 
40. 

Perkins's Transferring Plant, *77. 

Perronet's Chapelets (Chain -pumps), at Orleans, 
France, 84. 

Perry, E. W., 413. 

Peters's Scientific Discoveries, 300. 

Petroleum, 1S9-192. 

Phelps, E. S.,394. 

Philadelphia, Academy of Art, 403, 404. 

Phlogiston, Doctrine of, 331. 

Phoenician and Egyptian Writing, *119. 

PhoBnix, John (George H. Derby), 390. 

Photographic Apparatus, by L. M. Rutherford, 302, 
S03. 

Photography, 140-142. 321-323. 



Photo-lithography, 142-144. 

Photo-micrography, 145, 146; Woodward's Apparatus, 
*145. 

Photo Processes and Discoveries, 144, 145. 

Physiological Chemistry, 334. 

Pianos, 116, 117. 

Pickering's, Timothy, Plow, 45. 

Pictures, Forgeries of, 402. 

Pile-driving, 80. 

Pine, Robert E., 40S. 

"Pine-tree" Coinage, 70. 

Planets, Discovery of Minute, 300. 

Planing-machine, 75. 

Plow and Hoe, Origin of, *43. 

Plows, Rude Modern,* American, ofl776, *44; of 1785- 
1874, * Howard Wheel, *45 ; Fowler's Steam, *46. 

Plymouth Colony, Formation of, 214. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, 379. 

Poems, Individual, 395, 396. 

Poets, Early, 355-357. 

Political Growth, Historic Causes of, 200, 261; Re- 
form, Need of, 277, 278. 

Population, Growth and Distribution of (with five 
Maps), 211-237:— Acquisition of Territory (with 
Map), 212 ; Louisiana, 213 ; Florida, Texas, and New 
Mexico, 213; Settlement in 1607-1660, and Forma- 
tion of Virginia, Maryland, Plymouth, and Salem, 
214; New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Islaud, Con- 
necticut, New Haven, New Amsterdam, and Long 
Islaud, 215; Settlement in 1660-16SS, and Forma- 
tion of Delaware, New Jersey, and the Caroiinas, 
216 ; Settlement in 1688-1754, 217, 218-221 ; Forma- 
tion of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Tennessee, Ken- 
tucky, and Michigan, 219; Progress of Settlement 
in the United States, East of 100th Meridiau (with 
Map), 221 : Settlement in 1754-1790, Westward Emi- 
gration, 220, 221; Settlement in 1790-1S70, and the 
First Census taken, 221, 222; Extension of Settle- 
ment since 1790 ; Segregation of the Colonies, 222, 
223; Centre of Population and Growth of Cities, 
224,225; The Arithmetical and Geographical Prog- 
ress of the National Growth (with Map), 226, 227 ; 
Pacific Coast Settlement, 22S; The Post-office, 229, 
230 ; Constituents of our Population, 231 ; Our For- 
eign Elements, 231-236 ; Interstate Migration (with 
Map), 235, 236 ; Density of Population in 1S70 (with 
Map), 230, 237. 

Population of the States at the Formation of the Re- 
public, 19 ; Increase of the, 160 ; Constituents of our, 
231-236 ; Religious, 484. 

Porcelain, 110. 

Portrait-painting, 406-412. 

Portsmouth, 215. 

Post-office, The, 229, 230. 

Post, Wright, 423. 

Postage and Revenue Stumps, 77. 

Powers, Hiram, Portrail of, 411; The " Greek Slave," 
402; Sketch of, 413, 414. 

Prairie Produce, 206. 

Prayer-meeting, Fulton Street, New York, 4SS. 

Presbyterians, The, 4^2. 

Prescott, William H., 382, 383. 

Press, Power of the, 290. 

Preston, Mrs. M. J., 390. 

Priestley, Robert, 294, 295. 

Princeton College, 23, 37. 

Printing first introduced in America, 36; Types and 
Presses, 117-135;* for the Blind, 136; Chronograph, 
300, 301. 

Prisons, Management of Criminals in, 454, 455 ; Over- 
crowded, 456^458 ; County, 461 ; Reform in, 401-463 ; 



INDEX. 



503 



Religious Instruction in, 4G3 ; Secular Teaching and 
Libraries in, 464, 405 ; Treatment of Unfortunate 
Children in, 404, 405 ; Review of the, 471, 472. 

Products, Exchanges of, Causiug the National 
Strength, 205. 

Prose-writers displaying more Talent than Poets, 357. 

Prosperity, Legal Obstructions to our, 210. 

Protection of Animals, 450. 

Protestant Denominations, 4S0-4S3. 

Puddling-machine, *70. 

Pnlping-engine, *112. 

Pumping-engiues, 83, 84 ; Cornish, *51. 

Q. 

Quaker Settlements, The, 262. 
Quetelet's Scientific Researches, 311-314. 
Quincy, Edmund, 384. 

Races in the South, Conflict of, 209. 

Railways, Introduction of, iu England, 1829, 5S; in 
America, 1S26, 59. 

Ransome's Plows, 45. 

Read, T. Buchanan, 395. 

Reaping in Gaul, *47. 

Reaping-machines, 46-49; Gladstone's,* Bell's, *48; 
The "Champion," *49. 

Rebellion, The, and its Results, 2GS, 269. 

Redfield, W.C., 314-316. 

Reform needed in Journalism, 276 ; in Politics, 276- 
27S. 

Reformed Procedure, 450, 451. 

Reid, W. W., 427. 

Reidesel, Baroness, 33. 

Rein hart, Charles S.,415. 

Religion — Calvinism, 359 ; Unitarian, 366- 36S. See 
Denominations. 

Religious Development, 473-492 : — Early Religious Sen- 
timent, Peter Faneuil, John Laurens, and John Win- 
throp, 474,475; The Revolutionary Struggle, Revo- 
lution, and Politics, 476, 477 ; Paul Revere and Bish- 
op Madison, 477; The Methodists and Bishop As- 
btiry, 477 ; Intemperance and the large Consumption 
of Spirits, 47S; Ecclesiastical Independence com- 
menced in Virginia and extended to the other Col- 
onies, 47S, 479 ; Founding of various Protestant De- 
nominations, 4S0-4S3 ; Episcopal Church — Captain 
John Smith, Rev. John Hunt, and Bishops Seabury, 
White, and Provoost, 4S0, 4S1 ; Congregationalism- 
John Robinson, 4S1 ; Reformed Dutch Church — Rev. 
Jonas Michaelius and Rev. Dr. J. H. Livingston, 
481; The Baptists— Roger Williams, 4S1, 482; The 
Lutherans — Rev. Jacob Fabricius, 4S2 ; The Presby- 
terians — John Rodgers, 482; The German Reformed 
Church, 482 ; The Methodists— Bishop Asbury, 482 ; 
Roman Catholicism first commenced in Maryland 
under Lord Baltimore (Crecilius Calvert), the First 
Cardinal being Archbishop M'Closkey, 4S3, 484 ; De- 
nominational Statistics, 4S4, 4S5; The Freedmen's 
Bureau, 4S0 ; Great Revivals — Jonathan Edwards, 
George Whitefield, Samuel Finley, Dr. Griffin, Ful- 
ton Street Prayer-meeting, New York, and Moody 
and Sankey, 4S6^1SS ; Religious Fraternization in 
the War, 4S8, 489 ; Sanitary Commission under the 
Supervision of the Rev. H. W. Bellows, 4S9 ; Practi- 
cal Character of our Religious Development, 4S9, 
490; Meeting of the Evangelical Alliance in New 
York in 1S73, 4S9 ; Election of Dr. Ware to a Pro- 
fessorship in Harvard University, 489 ; Unitarian 
Controversy, 489, 490 ; Reactionary Elements, The 
Roman Catholics, Temperance Reform, and the In- 
terchange of Evangelistic Efforts, 490^192. 



Religious Sects in North and South, 20 ; Feeling of 
Jonathan Edwards, 349, 350 ; Statistics, 484, 4S5. 

" Resolutions of '98," 354, 355. 

Revere, Paul, Portrait of, 399 ; Sketch of, 414, 477. 

Revivals, Great, 4S6^S8. 

Revolution, True Cause of the, 156-159; Progress 
since, 159-171 ; Results of the, 266. 

Revolutionary Struggle, 476, 477. 

Rhode Island in 1775, Democracy in, 22 ; Colony of, 
215. 

Rice, Production of, 24; as a Barter Medium, 239. 

Rittenhouse, David, 294. 

Rives, William C, 3S4. 

Robinson, John, 4S1. 

Rocky Mountains, 185. 

Rodgers, John, 482. 

Rogers, John, 414. 

Rogers, Randolph, 414. 

Rogers, W. B., 316-31S. 

Rolling-mill for Iron Bars, 71. 

Roman Catholics, Statistics of, 490, 491. 

Rood, O. N., Professor, 319-321. 

"Rotherham" Plow, The, 44. 

Rowson, Susanna, 357, 35S. 

Ruling-machine, 137. 

Rush, Benjamin, 418. 

S. 

Salem, Massachusetts Bay, Colony of, 214. 

Sargent, Epes, 395. 

Saturn, Satellites of, 29S; Rings of, 299; Memoir on, 
by Professor B. Peirce and J. C. Maxwell, 307. 

Saws, Circular, *89 ; Baud, *90. 

Saxe, John G., 396. 

Saxton's Scientific Instruments, 300 ; Researches, 324- 
331. 

Schiaparelli's Scientific Researches, 311-314. 

Schools of New England and New York, 281 ; Estab- 
lishment of Normal, 2S5. 

Sciences, The Natural, First Steps in, 337, 338 ; Socie- 
ties and Local Development, 33S, 339 ; General Ex- 
plorations, 339, 340 ; Mineralogy, 341, 342 ; Botany, 
342, 343 ; Zoology, 343-346 ; Paleontology, 346, 347 ; 
Geology, 347, 34S. 

Scientific Progress, 294-34S: — The Exact Sciences and 
Activity of David Rittenhouse, 294 ; Robert Priestley 
and Benjamin Thompson, 294, 295 ; Transit of Venus 
Expedition, 295 ; Encouragement of Science by the 
Government and the Smithsonian Institution, 295, 
296; Wilkes's Exploring Expedition, The Lynch 
Dead Sea Exploration, Gillis's Solar Parallax Ex- 
pedition, 295, 296; Nathaniel Bowditch's Comment- 
ary on the Mecanique Celeste of Laplace, Professor 
Benjamin Peirce's Publications, The Algebra of 
Professor Theodore Strong, The Memoir on "Music- 
al Temperament," by Professor A. M. Fisher, The 
Essay of Professor Fisher on the "Calculus of Vari- 
ations," Professor Patterson's "Calculus of Opera- 
tions,'' Professor Newton's Memoirs on Questions 
of High Geometry, General Alvord's "Tangencies 
of Circles and Spheres,'' Professor Ferrel's "Con- 
verging Series,'" General Barnard's "Theory of the 
Gyroscope " and " Problems iu Rotary Motion," 
297; Astronomical Science, 297-314 — Sir William 
Herschel's and Mr. Lassell's Astronomical Discov- 
eries, 298; Telescope of the Cambridge Observatory 
Mounted, and Discovery of the Eighth Satellite of 
Saturn by the Messrs. Bond, which received the 
name of Hyperion, 298; Saturn's Rings noticed by 
Messrs. Bond, Dawes, Lassell, Galle, Father Secchi, 
Otto Strove, J. Capini, and Halley, and the Discov- 
ery of Sirius, 299; Completion of Alvau Clark's 



504 



INDEX. 



Great Telescope, and Award of the Lalaude Medal, 
299; Discovery of Comets by W. C. Bond, Maria 
Mitchell, and Mr. Tuttle, 299, 300 j Discovery of Mi- 
nute Planets by American Observers and Detection 
of Asteroids by Messrs. James Ferguson, Searle, 
Tuttle, Watson, and Peters, 300; Practical Astrono- 
my, The Automatic Registration of Time Observa- 
tions by Electro-magnetism Discovered by Profess- 
or J. Locke, to whom were awarded Ten Thousand 
Dollars, 300 ; Telegraph Instruments by Morse, 
Mitchell, Saxton, and the Messrs. Bond, 300; Print- 
ing Chronograph, by Professor George W. Hough, 
300, 301 ; Longitudinal Determinations and Im- 
provement of Instruments, 301 ; Grinding a Metal 
Speculum, Optical Experiments, by Alvau Clark, 
and Appreciation of the Same by W. B. Dawes, 300 
-302; Rutherford's Photographic Apparatus, 302, 
303; Scientific Experiments, by Dr. Henry Diaper, 
303, 304 ; Detection of a Planet in August, 1846, Pro- 
fessor S. C. Walker's Planetary Theory in Febru- 
ary, 1S47, Herschel's Discovery of the Planet Ura- 
nus, Laeaille's Histoire Celeste, and a Theory of Nep- 
tune, by Kowalski, 304; Newcomb on the Epheme- 
rides, 304, 305 ; Application of the Principles of Grav- 
itation in Astronomy with Reference to Inequali- 
ties, 306, 307 ; The Saturniau System the Subject of 
Memoirs by Professors B. Peirce and J. C. Maxwell, 
and the Exposition of Certain Harmonies of the 
Solar System, by Professors S. Alexander and D. 
Kirkwood, 307, 308 ; Solar Physics, Observations by 
George, Wilson, Sir W. Herschel, T. De la Rue, B. 
Stewart, Messrs. Loewy and Faye, Father Secchi, 
Professors Loomis, Hunt, Laugley Young, and A. 
M. Mayer, 308, 309 ; The Chromosphere discovered 
by Professor C. A. Young, 309 ; Professor A. M. May- 
er's Device for the Study of the Laws of the Distri- 
bution of Heat, 309; Comets— Treated by Professors 
Alexander, Loomis, Norton, Peirce, and Mr. George 
P. Bond, 309, 310 ; Auroras — Studied by E. C. Her- 
rick, Professors Loomis and Lovering, 310 ; Meteor- 
ic Astronomy and Comets demonstrated to be iden- 
tical by Diogenes of Apollouia, Professors Olmsted, 
Newton, Schiaparelli, Hubbard, Klinkerfues, Weiss, 
W. Wright, and Young, and Messrs. E. C. Herrick, 
Qnetelet, Winnecke, Bradley, H. B. Tuttle, and 
Adams, 311-314; Meteorology— Opinions held by 
Drs. Franklin, Wells, W. C. Redtield, J. P. Espy, 
Professors Loomis, C. Abbe, and Henry, 314- 
316; Signal -office Weather Maps, 316; Profess- 
or Tyndall's Singing -tubes, 316; Acoustics — In- 
vestigations by Professors Helmholtz, W. B. Rog- 
ers, Henry and A. M. Mayer, 316-318; Science of 
Optics, 318, 319; The Spectrum — Observations by 
Dr. Wollaston, Dr. Draper, Messrs. L. M. Ruther- 
furd, Lockyer, F. A. Nobert, Professor O. N. Rood, 
and Dr. W. Gibbs, 319-321 ; Important Discovery 
in the Distribution of Fieat in the Spectrum made 
by Dr. Draper, 321; Photography — Discoveries 
by Daguerre, Draper, Rutherfurd, and Professor 
Wheatstone, 321-323 ; The Stereoscope, 323 ; Forms 
of Apparatus for the Artificial Production of Cold, 
323 ; The Microscope — Discoveries by J. J. Lister, 
C. S. Spencer, R. B. Tolles, W. Wales, and Profess- 
ors Bailey and II. L. Smith, 323, 324; Electricity- 
Discoveries in Magnetism, Voltaic Induction, Mag- 
neto-electricity, Induction Coils, Static and Thermo- 
electricity, by Franklin, Hare, Dauiell, Arago, Davy, 
Sturgeon, Henry, Morse, Faraday, Saxton, Ritchie, 
Page, Ruhmkorff, Farmer, and Professor Rood, 324- 
331 ; Completion of the Atlantic Telegraph under the 
Presidency of Cyrus W. Field, 326 ; Electro-magnet- 



ism as a Motive-power, 327 ; Fire-alarms and Elec- 
tro-magnetic Clock by E. S. Ritchie, 327; Magneto- 
electric Machine by Joseph Saxton and Dr. Page, 
32S ; Induction Coils by Dr. Page and Messrs. Ruhm- 
korff, 329, 330; Chemistry — Discoveries by Stahl, 
Lavoisier, Black, Cavendish, Priestley, Scheele, 
Wenzel, Higgius, Proust, Richter, Deville, Shiel, 
Hare, Clarke, Silliman, Guthrie, Soubeiran, Draper, 
Jackson, Blake, Gibbs, Cooke, and Dr. Smith, 331- 
336 ; Organic Chemistry, 331, 332 ; Compound Blow- 
pipe, 332, 333 ; Discovery of Chloroform by Soubei- 
ran, a French Chemist, and Dr. Samuel Guthrie, 
333; Method for Determining Carbon in Graphite, 
333 ; Physiological and Applied Chemistry, 334-336 ; 
Scientific Investigations, 336, 337 ; The Natural Sci- 
ences and their First Steps, 337, 338 ; Scientific So- 
cieties and Local Development, 338, 339; General 
Explorations, 339, 340; Mineralogy, 341, 342; Bot- 
any, 342, 343 ; Zoology, 343-346 ; Paleontology, 346, 
347; Geology, 347, 34S. 

Scotch-Irish populating Virginia, 21. 

Screw-propeller, Invention of the, 54. 

Sculpture and Sculptors, 413, 414. 

Seaman, Valentine, 421. 

Searles's Scientific Discoveries, 300. 

Sears, E. H., 395. 

Secchi, Father, 299, 308, 309. 

Sectarian Contest in Public Schools, 284. 

Sectarianism discarded by the Founders of the Ameri- 
can Republic, 17. 

Sects. See Denominations. 

Sedgwick, Catharine M., 393. 

Settlement East of the 100th Meridian, Map showing 
the Progress of, 221. 

Sewing-machines, 93-96 ; Singer's, *95. 

Shaw, H. W. (Josh Billings), 390. 

Sherman, General W. T., 3S4, 3S5. 

Shillaber, B. P., 390. 

Ship-building, Introduction of, 25, 39. 

Shooting-stars, 311-314. 

Short, William, 221. 

Signal-office Weather Maps, 316. 

Silk, Culture of, 150. 

Silver and its Processes, 108, 197-199. 

Simms, William G., 394. 

Simpson, Sir James Young, 425. 

Sims, J. Marion, 427. 

Singer's Sewing-machine, *95. 

Slater, Samuel, and his Manufactures, 1G4, 165. 

Slavery, Introduction of, 21, 264 ; Traffic in, 26 ; Aboli- 
tion of, 2GS. 

Small's Plow, *45. 

Smith, Captain John, 219, 4S0, 481. 

Smith, Nathan, 427. 

Smith, Pearsall, 492. 

Smith, William, 32. 

Smith's, Aaron, Plow, 45. 

Smith's, Adam, Treatise on the Wealth of Nations, 200. 

Smithsonian Institution, Organization of, 295, 296. 

Smybert, John, 400. 

Smyth, A. W., 424. 

Snyder, Governor, 243. 

Solar Camera, *141, 142; System, Exposition of cer- 
tain Harmonies of the, 307, 30S,- Physics, 308, 309. 

Soubeiran's Scientific Researches, 333. 

South, Education in the, 288. 

Spading-machines, 46. 

Spalding, Archbishop, 4S3. 

Sparks, Jared, 3S1. 

Spectrum, The, 319-321. 

Speculum, Grinding a Metal, 301. 



INDEX. 



50.5 



Spencer, Herbert, 39S. 

Spinning-machinery, 61-66 ; Wheel, *62. 

Spofford, Harriet Prescott, 394. 

Spottiswoode, Lieutenant-governor, 219. 

Sprague, Charles, 3T6, 377. 

Sprengel, Kurt, 179. 

Staigg, Richard M., 410. 

Stamps used as Currency, 256. 

" Stanhope " Printing-press, *12S. 

Stars, Shooting, 311-314. 

States, Commerce between the, 203 ; Migration be- 
tween, 236. 

Statutes, Revised, and Codes, 451. 

Steam-engine and its Applications, Newcomen's En- 
gine, *40, 51 ; Watt's Engine, *41 ; Cornish Putupiug- 
engine, *51, 52. 

Steam-hammers, *72. 

Steam -navigation, Steamboats, 52-54; Steamships, 
*54, 55 ; Locomotives, *55-60. 

Steam-plows, *46. 

Steam-pumps, S3. 

Steamship City of Peking, *154. 

Stearns, Dr., 42S. 

Stebbins, Emma, 414. 

Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 396. 

Steel, Cast, Invention of, 74, 169. 

Stephenson's Locomotive, *58. 

Stereoscope, The, 323. 

Stereotyping, "124-126. 

Stetef.jldt's Roasting Furnace, 108. 

Stethoscope, 421. 

Stevens, Mr., 256. 

Stewart, B.,30S, 309. 

Stiles, Dr., 4S4. 

Stirling's Threshing-machine, 52. 

Stock, Importation of Live, 1S1-1S3. 

Stoddard, Richard Henry, 395. 

Stone, Oliver, 410. 

Story, W. W., 395,414. 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 393. 

Street, A. B., 395. 

Strong, Theodore, 297. 

Struve, Otto, 299. # 

Stuart, Gilbert Charles, Portrait, 401 ; Biographical 
Sketch of, 409. 

Stuyvesant, P., 35. 

Suffolk Bank System Organized, 246. 

Suffrage, Universal, 273, 274. 

Sugar, 109, 110 ; Modern Process of Making, *110. 

Sully, Thomas, Portrait of, 407; Sketch of, 410. 

Sumner, Charles, 3S7, 3S8. 

Surgery, Improvements in, 427, 428. 

Swedish Settlements along the Delaware, 20. 

Symington's, Charlotte Dundas, Steamboat, *53. 



Taney, R. B., 247, 24S. 

Tariff Compromise effected, 267. 

Taylor, Bayard, 379, 380. 

Taylor's Machine Gun, *99. 

Tea and Coffee Duties Repealed, 257. 

Telegraphs, *100-102 ; Atlantic Telegraph Completed, 

326. 
Telescopes, 78 ; Alvan Clark's, 299. 
Temperance Reform, 492. 
Tennessee Attacked by Indians, 19 ; Founded by 

James Robertson, 219. 
Terhune, Mrs. (Marian Harland), 394. 
Territory, Acquisition of (with Map), 212. 
"Thanatopsis," a Poem, by W. C. Bryant, 361. 



Thaxter, Celia, 396. 

Theological Writers, Early, 35S-359 ; Literature, 397. 

Theology, Calviuistic, 359. 

Thermo-electricity, 331. 

Thermometer, 421, 422. 

"Thirteen," The Immortal, 218. 

Thomas, T. G., 427. 

Thompson, Benjamin, 294, 295. 

Thompson, Lauut, 414. 

Thoreau, Henry D., 3S9. 

Threshing-machines, *49, 50. 

Ticknor, George, 385. 

Timrod, Henry, 396. 

Tobacco, Growth of, 24 ; Cultivation of, ISO. 

Transportation, 205 ; of Nautical Chronometers, 301. 

Treasury Department Established, 241. 

Trevethick and Vivian's Locomotives, *55. 

Trowbridge, J. T., 395. 

Trumbull, Colonel John, Portrait of, 403 ; Biograph- 
ical Sketch of, 356, 410. 

Tuckerman, Henry T., 396. 

Tull's, Wheat Drill, 176. 

Tunneling, Mont Cenis and Hoosac, 85. 

Turning-lathes, 75. 

Tuttle's Scientific Discoveries, 299, 300. 

Twain, Mark (S. L. Clemens), 390. 

Tyndall's Singiug-tubes and Sensitive Flames, 316. 

Type and Type-founding, etc., 120, *123; Setting and 
Distributing Machine, 123, 124. 

U. 

Underwood, F. H.; 396. 

Union, Colonial Preparation for the, 264, 265. 

Union, Experiment of the, with its Preparations, 260- 
278 :— Historic Causes of Political Growth, 260, 261 ; 
Quaker Settlements, Catholics of Maryland, Dutch 
of New Netherlands, and the Fortunate Conditions 
of the Colonists, 262, 263 ; Introduction of Slavery, 
and Colonial Preparations for the Union, 264, 265; 
The Revolution and its Results, and Rev. E. A. Free- 
man on Federal Governments, 266 ; The Doctrine of 
Nullification and Tariff Compromise, 267; The Re- 
bellion and its Results, 268, 269; Abolition of Slav- 
ery, 26S ; Conflict of Races in the South, 269 ; The 
Strength of the Executive, 270-272; The Danger of 
Consolidation, and Universal Suffrage, 273, 274; 
Danger from the Influx of Catholics, and Financial 
Perils, 275, 276 ; Greater Personal Integrity needed 
in Congress, and Reform in Journalism, 276 ; Need 
of Political Reform, 276, 277 ; Expectations for the 
Future, 278. 

Union Trust Company, Suspension of, 259. 

Unitarian ism, Controversy on, 489, 490. 



Vaccination, Discovery of, 420, 421. 

Vanderlyu, John, 410. 

Vansittart, Mr., 257. 

Varley, Henry, 492. 

Vedder, Elihn, 413. 

Verrugas Viaduct, in the Andes of Peru, 86. 

Very, Jones, 396. 

"Victory," Hoe's great Printing-press, *135. 

Virginia, Class Feeling in, 17 ; A Great Wilderness, 19 ; 
Loyalty to the Stuarts, 20; Illiteracy in the Colony, 
20; Slavery first introduced in, and the Opposition 
to, 21 ; Establishment of Episcopacy, 21 ; Settlement 
at Jamestown, 150, 214. 

Vivian's Locomotive, *55. 

Voltaic Induction, 328, 329. 



506 



INDEX. 



W. 

Walker, S. C, 304. 

Walsh, Robert, 4S3. 

Walter's Perfecting Press, *132, 143. 

Wampum used as Money, 29, 238. 

War of 1812, and its Results, 160, 167 ; Debt, 243. 

War of the Rebellion, Christian Religious Fraternity 
during the, 4S8, 4S9. 

Ward, Artemus (C. F. Browne), 390. 

Ward, J. Q. A, 414. 

Ware, Dr., 4S9. 

Ware, John, 428. 

Ware, William, 393. 

Warner, Charles Dudley, 391. 

Warren, John C, 427. 

Washing-machines, 97. 

Washington, George, 35; First Message to Congress, 
161. 

"Washington," No. 1, Steam Fire-engine, *105. 

Washington, Patent Office at, *39. 

" Washington " Printing Press, The, *129. 

Watch-making, 77, 78. 

Water-color Society, 405, 406. 

Waterhouse, Benjamin, 421. 

Water Supply in London, 52 ; Current-wheel at Lon- 
don Bridge, 1731, *34. 

Watson, John, 399. 

Watson's Scientific Discoveries, 300. 

Watt's Mechanical Inventions to the Steam-engine, 
•41. 

Wayland, Francis, 397. 

Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith's Treatise on the, 200. 

Weaving Machinery, 66, 67. 

Webster, Daniel, 256, 386, 387. 

Weighing-machines, 107. 

Weiss, Professor, 311-314. 

Wells, 86. 

Wells, Dr., 314-316. 

Wells, Horace, 426. 

West, Benjamin, Portrait of, 401 ; Biography of, 406, 
407. 

Westward Emigration, 219, 220. 

Whale-fishery established, 25. 

Wheatstone, Professor, 321-323. 

White, Edwin, 413. 

White, James P., 427. 



White, Richard Grant, 390. 

White, S. Pomeroy, 423. 

Whitefield, George, 4S7. 

Whitman, Walt, 389. 

Whitney, A. D. T., 394. 

Whitney's Cotton-gin, 40, *60. 

Whittemore's Card-sticking Machine, 40. 

Whittier, John Greenleaf, 373, 374. 

Whittredge, Worthington, 412. 

Wilde, R. H., 395. 

Wilkes's Exploring Expedition of 1838, 295. 

Willard Asylum, The, 470. 

William and Mary's College, 37. 

Williams, Roger, 215, 481, 482. 

Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 377, 378. 

Wilson, Augusta Evans, 394. 

Wilson, Forceythe, 395. 

Wilson, G., 308, 309. 

Wiunecke's Scientific Researches, 311-314. 

Winthrop, John, 474, 475. 

Winthrop, Theodore, 394. 

Witherspoon, Dr., 37. 

Wolcott, Oliver, 233. 

Wollastou, Dr., 319-321. 

Wollaston's Portrait-painting, 407. 

Women, Rights of Married, 44S, 449. 

Wood, George B., 428. 

Wood, J., 413, 427. 

Wood's, Jethro, Plow, *45. 

Woodman, John, 267. 

Woodville, R. C, 413. 

Woodward's Photo-micrographic Apparatus, *145. 

Wood-working, 8S-*92. 

Woodworth, Samuel, 395. 

Woolen Manufactures, 170. 

Woolf, Michael, 415. 

Worth, Thomas, 415. 

Wright, W., 311-314. 

Wust, T., 415. 

Y. 

Yale College, 37. 

Young's Scientific Researches, 30S-314. 



Zoology, 343-346. 



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WHITE'S MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW. The Massacre of St Bartholo- 
mew: Preceded by a History of the Religions Wars in the Rei.rii of Charles IX 
By Henry White, M.A. With Illustrations. Svo, Cloth, $1 75. 



